Contemporary Authors

• Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2009
• Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets Kelsey Street Press (Berkeley, CA), 2015
• 100 Chinese Silences Les Figues Press (Los Angeles, CA), 2016

1. 100 Chinese silences LCCN 2015958635 Type of material Book Personal name Yu, Timothy (Professor of literature), author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title 100 Chinese silences / Timothy Yu. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Los Angeles, CA : Les Figues Press, [2016] Description 135 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781934254615 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1934254614 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3625.U18 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Nests and strangers : on Asian American women poets LCCN 2014023622 Type of material Book Main title Nests and strangers : on Asian American women poets / Edited with an Introduction by Timothy Yu ; Afterword by Mg Roberts. Published/Produced Berkeley, CA : Kelsey Street Press, [2015] Description vii, 100 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780932716811 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 037912 CALL NUMBER PS153.A84 N46 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Race and the avant-garde : experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965 LCCN 2008029274 Type of material Book Personal name Yu, Timothy (Professor of literature) Main title Race and the avant-garde : experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965 / Timothy Yu. Published/Created Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2009. Description xi, 192 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780804759977 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0823/2008029274.html Shelf Location FLM2013 023837 CALL NUMBER PS153.A84 Y8 2009 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1)

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-yu-11b88a5

  Timothy Yu
  Professor of English and Asian American Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison
  University of Wisconsin-Madison Stanford University
  Madison, Wisconsin 232 232 connections

  Experience
  University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Professor of English and Asian American Studies
  Company NameUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
  Dates EmployedMay 2016 – Present Employment Duration11 mos
  University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Director, Asian American Studies Program
  Company NameUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
  Dates EmployedJul 2013 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs 9 mos
  University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies
  Company NameUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
  Dates EmployedAug 2009 – May 2016 Employment Duration6 yrs 10 mos
  University of Toronto
  Assistant Professor of English
  Company NameUniversity of Toronto
  Dates Employed2004 – 2009 Employment Duration5 yrs
  Commonwealth School
  Teacher and Chatfield Fellow
  Company NameCommonwealth School
  Dates Employed1996 – 1998 Employment Duration2 yrs
  Education
  Stanford University
  Stanford University
  Degree Name Ph.D. Field Of Study English
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1998 – 2005
  Harvard University
  Harvard University
  Degree Name AB Field Of Study Social Studies and English
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1992 – 1996

  Accomplishments
  Timothy has 2 publications2
  Publications
  See publication 100 Chinese Silences
  publication title100 Chinese Silences
  publication descriptionPoetry. Selected as the editor's selection in the 2014 NOS Book Contest. There are one hundred kinds of Chinese silence: the silence of unknown grandfathers; the silence of borrowed Buddha and rebranded Confucius; the silence of alluring stereotypes and exotic reticence. These poems make those silences heard. Writing back to an orientalist tradition that has defined modern American poetry, these 100 Chinese silences unmask the imagined Asias of American literature, revealing the spectral Asian presence that haunts our most eloquent lyrics and self- satisfied wisdom. Rewriting poets from Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore to Gary Snyder and Billy Collins, this book is a sharply critical and wickedly humorous travesty of the modern canon, excavating the Asian (American) bones buried in our poetic language.
  publication descriptionLes Figues Press
  publication dateMay 2016
  Authors
  Timothy Yu
  See publication Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965
  publication titleRace and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965
  publication descriptionA groundbreaking study of contemporary American poetry, Race and the Avant-Garde changes the way we think about race and literature. Examining two of the most exciting developments in recent American writing, Timothy Yu juxtaposes the works of experimental language poets and Asian American poets—concerned primarily with issues of social identity centered around discourses of race. Yu delves into the 1960s social upheaval to trace how Language and Asian American writing emerged as parallel poetics of the avant-garde, each with its own distinctive form, style, and political meaning.

  From its provocative reevaluation of Allen Ginsberg to fresh readings of Ron Silliman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and John Yau, along with its analysis of a new archive of Asian American writers from the 1970s, this book is indispensable for readers interested in race, Asian American studies, contemporary poetry, and the avant-garde.
  publication descriptionStanford University Press
  publication date2009

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/timothy-yu

  Timothy Yu
  Poet Details
  Poet and scholar Timothy Yu was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. He earned his BA at Harvard and a PhD at Stanford University. Yu’s scholarly and creative work explores the intersections of race and avant-garde writing traditions; his first book of criticism Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (2009) won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry: Immersion (1995); Postcard Poems (2003), cowritten with Cassie Lewis; Journey to the West (2006), which won a Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman; and 15 Chinese Silences (2012), which is part of a longer work that takes its impetus from the Billy Collins poem “Grave.” Yu has said of this project: “I took it upon myself to write these silences, which for me became a symbol of the way Asia and Asians are present, yet silenced, in American culture.”

  Yu’s poems and criticism have appeared in journals such as Contemporary Literature, Shampoo, and Genre. He lives with his wife and daughter in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His newest book, 100 Chinese Silences, will be published by Les Figues Press.

• Timothy Yu Home Page - http://www.timpanyu.com/

  ABOUT
  Photo of Timothy Yu
  Timothy Yu. Photo by Robin Valenza.
  Timothy Yu is associate professor of English and Asian American Studies and director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press), the Editor’s Selection in the 2014 NOS Book Contest. He is also the author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press), which won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is the editor of the collection Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press), and he also serves as an editor of the journal Contemporary Literature.

  His poetry publications include two chapbooks, 15 Chinese Silences (Tinfish Press) and Journey to the West (Barrow Street), winner of the Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman. His poems have also appeared in Poetry, Cordite, Mantis, SHAMPOO, Lantern Review, and Kartika Review. His essays and reviews have appeared in Jacket, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Volta, Meanjin, and on CNN.com.

  His current research project, Diasporic Poetics, examines the emergence of “Asian” identities in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and explores how poets of Asian descent navigate these identities through poetic form. The poetry of writers such as Myung Mi Kim, Fred Wah, and Ouyang Yu often reflects movement across national borders, but also develops unexpected aesthetic connections that register local and global connections of race, ethnicity, and politics.

  He earned his AB from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, and has previously taught at the University of Toronto.

QUOTED: "Through deep insight and creative repurposing, Yu makes a place for himself within an evolving, and more inclusive, narrative of American poetry."

100 Chinese Silences
Publishers Weekly. 263.25 (June 20, 2016): p132.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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100 Chinese Silences

Timothy Yu. Les Figues (SPD, dist.), $17 trade

paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-934254-61-5

Yu (Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965) combines his academic background in Asian American studies with his talent for verse in a witty and illuminating collection that unmasks cultural appropriation in American literature. Most of the 100 poems draw inspiration from source poems, but that source material becomes the target of intense and deserved criticism, not idolatry. Yu eviscerates his array of predecessors--including Ezra Pound, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Tony Hoagland--for their generally ignorant use of Asian stereotypes and their reductive approaches to Chinese culture. He sums up such reductionism in a line about Pound: "He tried to embrace an empire/ In an ideogram." Yu goes far beyond such cringe-worthy titles as "I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets" and rewrites the poems, emphasizing the cliches and deep-rooted insensitivities. In doing so, he breaks the silence of the appropriated and subverts a homogenized history. The poems ask when, if ever, cultural appropriation is acceptable, or respectable. Yu's poems often slip into anger over the accumulation of cultural insults: "We're not asking for a goddamn prize./ We just want to be appropriated/ with a little fucking consideration." Through deep insight and creative repurposing, Yu makes a place for himself within an evolving, and more inclusive, narrative of American poetry. June)

QUOTED: "He raises these questions powerfully with his lucid prose, which communicates to us his logical, careful, insightful, and fair-minded argument. His prioritization of the avant-garde and the experimental is not a flaw, in the end, but a way of cutting through the occasional fog around poetic effect and meaning created by identity politics and by the mainstream literary culture's privileging of the lyric to the exclusion of the oppositional stances of white and Asian American avant-gardes."
"Torn between doing justice to the politics of the tradition and appreciating fully its poetics, in other words, Yu errs on the side of poetics. In the end, the defining strength of his book is its analysis of verse, and such detailed, perceptive, and thorough readings are sorely needed. Poetry scholars interested in how to address innovative poetry through careful description and the unpacking of details can turn to this book as a model. Yu understands why innovative poets develop their non-narrative, nonlyric strategies, and he is remarkably attentive to how these strategies work in particular poems."
"He also provides a meaningful account of how these strategies relate to various political ambitions, and he does so with sophistication and with no axe to grind. Though I wish he would have explored these politics, and the politics of his own terms, more fully, his book does indeed suggest distinctive and sustainable ways to examine the relationship between ethnic literary traditions and poetic innovation, between race and the avant-garde. Like the poets it prizes, this book is doing something new. It is well worth reading."

By Any Other Name: Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965
Keith D. Leonard
Twentieth Century Literature. 56.3 (Fall 2010): p428.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Hofstra University
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Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965

by Timothy Yu

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 192 pages

Timothy Yu is on to something. While his book Race and the Avant-Garde does not challenge as fully as it could the problematic exclusion of ethnic writers from discussions of poetic innovation, it does beautifully complicate what the avant-garde means. This allows Yu to identify how race politics inform the white avant-garde, to provide an insightful history of Asian American poetics, and to offer elegant readings of the most innovative Asian American poets. In his argument Yu astutely explores how, compared to the experimental, the category of the avant-garde applies to a community rather than to a shared aesthetic practice or strategy. This distinction, he contends, clarifies how both the Language poets and their Asian American peers negotiated the implications of race and community for their ideals about the formal practice and social meaning of poetry. He seeks to demonstrate that, as he puts it, "after 1970 the question of race became central to the constitution of any American avant-garde, as writers and artists became increasingly aware of how their social locations inflected their aesthetics" (2). As a result, he claims, "communities of writers of color can themselves be best understood in the terms we developed for the analysis of the avant-garde." Analyzing the racial self-awareness subtly central to contemporary Anglo American avant-garde artists, in other words, Yu usefully challenges the notion that experimental poetics achieved the rejection of identity politics it sometimes claims for itself. At the same time, he clarifies how racial and ethnic identity formation led Asian American poets to form artistic communities analogous to those of the white avant-garde. He ultimately provides a literary history of Asian American poetics that locates even formalist Asian American poets in an avant-garde and that includes innovative poets who are often excluded. Overall, he contributes meaningfully to the important ways scholars are currently rethinking the relationship between race, ethnicity, and formal innovation in twentieth-century American poetic culture.

Indeed, the most important and intriguing aspect of Yu's argument, to my mind, is his discussion of how fully the white male Language poets understood their social positionality as central to their artistic innovations. Other scholars have made the argument about the avant-garde as a community, but Yu provides the genuinely distinctive insight that race came to inform that community formation even among European American avant-gardists. Using Allen Ginsberg and Ron Silliman as his prime examples, he begins by demonstrating how these white avant-gardists self-consciously engaged with and critiqued the centrality of a universalized white subjectivity to poetic meaning. According to Yu, Ginsberg provides a distinctive origin for this practice because of his "conscious awareness of the avant-garde as a social fact." In these terms, Ginsberg's desire to depict "the best minds of his generation" in his famous poem "Howl" does not make him a confessional poet but rather a poet claiming to speak for a community of forward-thinking peers, the chronicler of their innovative social existence. Yu argues that Ginsberg's early poems like "Howl" are persuasive politically, therefore, because they focus not on the universality of a particular political subjectivity, the way Ginsberg's later "Wichita Vortex Sutra" or many ethnic protest poems do, but by "mark[ing their] origin in a particular community" while also "impl[ying] the potential universality of that community, creating a paradoxically inclusive coterie" (20). Yu then turns to his strength--the analysis of poetry--admirably demonstrating how Ginsberg's Whitmanian inclusiveness and paratactic lists influenced both Language poets and Asian American poetic innovators to imagine "inclusive coteries" likewise.

This reading of Ginsberg sets the stage for Yu's quite original analysis of the place of whiteness in the aesthetic and social ambitions of the Language poet community, a group of writers who, according to their greatest champions, somehow sidestep race problems. Yu subtitles his chapter on Ron Silliman "The Ethnicization of the Avant-Garde," a slightly awkward phrase for the provocative insight that Silliman, like his Language-poetry peers Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman, imagined their sense of community as analogous to that which obtained among marginalized ethnic poets. According to Yu, Silliman utilizes his "new sentence"--the paratactic, non-narrative accretion of clauses of description--"as a check against the limits of [the 'white male avant-gardist] perspective, aiming [instead] to create a broad-based account of contemporary experience that achieves a modicum of objectivity" (39). Yu also analyzes correspondence among Silliman, Bernstein, and Perelman, as well as their reviews and essays, to reveal how Silliman often expressed "anxiety over left fragmentation, with identity-based political groups seen as radically separatist" (49). Yet if Silliman strove for objectivity, he pursued this goal by insisting that the reader strive to comprehend the shared but obscure cultural codes by which the new sentence asserts its meanings. In other words, yearning to restore an "inclusive coterie" of the political left, Silliman follows Ginsberg into social particularity--the quotidian details recorded non-narratively by the new sentence--as the means to acknowledge and then traverse the racial particularity of Silliman's white and male subject position. By showing that Silliman was not alone in trying to imagine this racially specific yet socially inclusive coterie as he and his colleagues contended over the editorial policy of their journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Yu provides the admirably new and genuinely insightful sense that "race"--an engagement with whiteness--helped to shape the production of Language poetics.

The terms of Yu's history of the Asian American writing community as an avant-garde are slightly less original than his analysis of the Language poets as an ethnic community. But that history is insightful nonetheless, especially in its analysis of the experimental Asian American poets. In his third chapter, "Inventing a Culture: Asian American Poetry in the 1970s," Yu economically provides the kind of literary history that has been done quite well for other ethnic traditions, for instance by Eugene Redmond in Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry or Rafael Perez-Torres in Movements in Chicano Poetry. First of all, Yu does a good if brief job of tracing how the ill-fitting term Asian American came to be defined narrowly by the examples of prominent, largely lyric poets who studied in MFA workshops, such as Li-Young Lee, Cathy Song, and David Mura. As Yu puts it,

this formal consonance [with the mainstream taste for the lyric] has
allowed Asian American poetry to become an acceptable part of the
multicultural curriculum, a transparent conduit for those neglected
stories that some have asserted it is the job of minority literature
to tell. (74)
Yu then traces the story, itself neglected, of how Asian American literature actually arose simultaneously with Black Arts Movement nationalism. He identifies the artistic and political communities--the Asian American avant-garde--that, instead of lionizing individual lyric geniuses, produced the little magazines and pamphlets that grappled more fully with, the notion that art is central to the formation of a potentially radical, self-consciously ethnic cultural community. Seen in this light, the formal traditionalism of much Asian American poetry was the creation of an artistic community much like that of the Language poets, an avant-garde in which thinkers like Steve Louie and Frank Chin contended with each other over whether or not Asian American literary culture should follow the example of Black Nationalism. These debates eventually led the community to divide politics from poetics, a fissure that, according to Yu, produced the centrality of the well-known lyric poets to the conception of Asian American literature. This in turn masked the tradition's status as an avant-garde, obscuring both its explicit and self-conscious community and its formal innovation. This revised account of the Asian American poetic tradition is evocative and insightful.

Though Yu does not say so explicitly, however, it is pretty clear that the driving motivation behind his book is not the history of Asian American literature per se but rather Yu's desire to identify, appreciate, and valorize those innovative Asian American poets who have been excluded from the established narrative of Asian American literary history. And this priority raises questions the book does not fully answer, in part because they are questions that scholars of ethnic literatures wrestle with perennially. Yu admirably recuperates and interprets the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and illuminates, to borrow the subtitle of his last chapter, "John Yau and Experimental Asian American Writing." His readings of this challenging verse are impeccable. But the book seems to be saying that Asian American literature is valuable because there are these innovative poets and because it is an avant-garde, meaning that its community resembles that of the white avant-garde and its innovative literature similarly includes experimental writing. Yu seems to be using avant-garde as an honorific rather than a merely descriptive term--that is, to gather to Asian American poets the authority associated with the celebrated innovations of what Marjorie Perloff would call poetry of the Pound tradition. Hence his interest in recovering "The avant-gardism of Asian American poetry" that, he claims, "would 'disappear' for over a decade" and "would be reclaimed again only in the mid-1990s, in the wake of radical shifts in the reception of Asian American and experimental writing" (99).

But why must Asian American literature be or sponsor an avant-garde in order to have value? What is at stake in using that term rather than some terms culled from the little magazines constituting the Asian American avant-garde? If Asian American writing didn't resemble Language poetry, would it be worth reading? Why not instead offer a fuller illumination of its resemblance to Black Nationalism? In essence, Yu finds himself in the position of many scholars of non-European ethnic traditions in the US: borrowing established terms in ways that seek to expand the ethnic traditions they describe even as they risk maintaining the subordinate or marginal status of those traditions. How does Yu's approach contend with the thinking of, for example, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, whose work, as lie suggests, confirms his notion of avant-garde community but is more traditionally political? Indeed, how does it contend with the African American and Latino/Chicano scholarly traditions, which emphasize the distinctiveness of their respective literary cultures rather than their resemblance to the white avant-garde? Yu's book at times seems vulnerable to Silliman's critique of Bernstein, whom Silliman claimed was positing some universal realm of the aesthetic apart from the social differences he illustrated. Yu's dismissal of "sociology," by now a cliche in poetry studies, does not suffice, especially since that straw man is not fleshed out and, more to the point, since Yu himself proves that analyzing the social context of poetry is not the same as a sociological objectification of a racial other. He might contend that he is portraying a certain historical trajectory, not commenting on the politics of that trajectory: But I wish he would offer that commentary. I suspect that he would have had vigorous and intriguing answers to these questions.

In other words, precisely because these are not at all easy questions to answer, I would love to know what Yu thinks about them. How does one validate distinctive ethnic traditions without forcing them to conform too simplistically to established terms or leaving them bound by the limiting strictures of discourses of authenticity? In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance Houston A. Baker quite self-consciously used an image from The Great Gatsby to demonstrate how African Americans approached the modern moment from an entirely different direction than their white modernist peers. Similarly, Aldon Lynn Nielsen has done yeoman's work in unearthing and recuperating innovative African American poets, usually arguing, as he and coeditor Laura Ramey do in the introduction to Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, that the African American vernacular tradition needs to expand to include poets even Langston Hughes, the champion of the vernacular, appreciated: "it would seem unseemly for those of us who read after Langston Hughes to be less capacious and more captious in our critique than he was" (xiv). Rather than making these innovators exclusively into vernacular poets or into parallels of white experimentalists like the Language school, Nielsen's two powerful books, Black Chant and Integral Music, consistently challenge the notion that either the vernacular or dominant terms of poetic innovation should define this version of African American poetics. And as the subtitle to Perez-Torres's book Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins suggests, he too sets himself against such limiting mainstream terms as the only available language through which Chicano poetry might be understood. Yu is clearly not interested in such a validation of cultural distinctiveness and difference, which is fine, but he would have done well to have acknowledged and addressed more fully than he does why he privileges the avant-garde as a measure of literary value. "Why not validate the distinctiveness of the tradition rather than the similarities of its community building and formal innovation?

In other words, Yu could have taken his argument further and produced even more stunning insights than he does here, but he is so admirably careful to reserve judgment in this pithy book that he left this reader, for one, wanting more. Clearly his suggestion that the avant-garde of Language poetry is racially inflected complicates the usual sense of that movement as concerned with language alone or abstracted away from the social concerns that spawned it. On the contrary, Yu gives us a version of Language poetry organized around the self-conscious whiteness of its practitioners and their concern over the loss of the alleged unanimity of the left. Similarly, his notion that Asian American poetics was constituted by a contentious avant-garde rather than by isolated lyric geniuses complicates the individualist identitarian priorities of most readers of this body of verse, priorities that, as Yu points out, potentially narrow our understanding much further than this comparison to "marginalized" white avant-gardists. So Yu does undoubtedly complicate and expand the implications of these terms. Valorizing the avant-garde in this way may in fact be more illuminating than coming up with a term of analysis allegedly distinctive to Asian American aesthetics, whatever that could be. Nonetheless, there is much more to be said about how this approach to Asian American literary history challenges hegemonic notions of lyric genius, of formal innovation, and of the place of race in thinking about contemporary poetry.

But ultimately these quibbles are part of what makes Yu's book valuable. He raises these questions powerfully with his lucid prose, which communicates to us his logical, careful, insightful, and fair-minded argument. His prioritization of the avant-garde and the experimental is not a flaw, in the end, but a way of cutting through the occasional fog around poetic effect and meaning created by identity politics and by the mainstream literary culture's privileging of the lyric to the exclusion of the oppositional stances of white and Asian American avant-gardes. By shifting away from the obligation to tell neglected ethnic stories through individual experience, and by recognizing the interaction and debates in a community of writers, Yu can and does show that Asian American literary history is more complex than the relatively little scholarship thus far focused on it has suggested. In the process, Yu avoids and perceptively critiques the romanticization of "the East" in American literature and criticism and admirably resists the "sociological" terms by which poetry by nonwhite writers is often read, and read poorly at that. Torn between doing justice to the politics of the tradition and appreciating fully its poetics, in other words, Yu errs on the side of poetics. In the end, the defining strength of his book is its analysis of verse, and such detailed, perceptive, and thorough readings are sorely needed. Poetry scholars interested in how to address innovative poetry through careful description and the unpacking of details can turn to this book as a model. Yu understands why innovative poets develop their non-narrative, nonlyric strategies, and he is remarkably attentive to how these strategies work in particular poems. He also provides a meaningful account of how these strategies relate to various political ambitions, and he does so with sophistication and with no axe to grind. Though I wish he would have explored these politics, and the politics of his own terms, more fully, his book does indeed suggest distinctive and sustainable ways to examine the relationship between ethnic literary traditions and poetic innovation, between race and the avant-garde. Like the poets it prizes, this book is doing something new. It is well worth reading.

Works cited

Baker, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Language of African American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.

__. Integral Musk Language of African American Innovation. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, and Laura Ramey, eds. Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006.

Perez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicane Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Perloff, Marjorie. Tile Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996.

Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History. New York: Anchor, 1976.

Leonard, Keith D.

QUOTED: "In the past decade, scholars such as Juliana Chang, Dorothy Wang, Zhou Xiaojing, and Josephine Park have turned attention in Asian American literary studies toward poetry. Such a shift is long overdue, and Yu's book is an important contribution that foregrounds how Asian American poets engage with contemporary American poetics and culture." "In particular, by focusing on the social identities constructed by these poets through their art, Yu maintains that poetry has social and political relevance that is deeply engaged with both form and content. Yu's work spurs other scholars to reorient their thinking about "experimental" versus "ethnic" poetry, and this book will certainly facilitate further work in the years to come."

Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965
Paul Lai
MELUS. 35.2 (Summer 2010): p209.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Oxford University Press
http://webspace.ship.edu/kmlong/melus/
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Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965. Timothy Yu. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. xi + 192 pages. $45.00 cloth.

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 offers an argument that is profoundly startling in its originality yet quite obvious upon further reflection. In this comparative study, Yu reads Language poetry and Asian American poetry together to explore the ways in which they are avant-gardist in their self-positioning against mainstream American poetry. Both are deeply enmeshed in distinctive social groups that responded to political and aesthetic issues in the 1970s. Focusing on writers such as Ron Silliman for the Language poets and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and John Yau for Asian American poets, Yu reads their poems against the backdrop of the post-1965 protest culture, revealing strategies of formal experimentation yoked to social identity and community.

Scholars often align Language poetry with formal experimentation and Asian American poetry with racial politics. Yu, however, asserts that aesthetics and politics have always animated the work of both groups. He argues that both Language poets and Asian American poets created communities of artists defined by political and social relations. He also examines how Asian American poets actively constructed the community of Asian Americans by experimenting with poetic forms to create an understanding of social identity. Yu points out that despite these shared preoccupations, Language poets and Asian American poets seldom crossed paths or shared platforms, and developed their aesthetics and communities independently. Thus, he does not trace a shared genealogy for these two bodies of poetry but rather shows us the "vexed history of division" (16) between the two that has intensified over the decades despite their similarities as part of the contemporary American avant-garde.

A key component of Yu's analytical method is to read both Language and Asian American poetry through what he calls "a sociology of the avantgarde, which acknowledges the existence of multiple and even competing groups whose practices we might recognize as avant-garde and whose aesthetic programs are inflected by their differing social identifications" (3-4). Rather than simply identifying aesthetic traits that comprise a kind of poetry, he links such traits to the communities of poets that understand poetics as a revolutionary practice. For Yu, an aspect of this sociological exploration is identifying the significant institutions of publication and distribution associated with both Language and Asian American poetry to gesture toward the kinds of writer-reader exchanges that grounded their communities.

Chapter One positions Allen Ginsberg as a figure whose formal, experimental concerns meshed with racial and social issues in the cultural moment just before the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yu writes, "To revisit Ginsberg ... is to return to the concept of the political, seeking to grasp how the idea of a contemporary American political poetry emerges in Ginsberg's work" (19). Reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and his later "Wichita Vortex Sutra," Yu suggests that the shift registered in these two poems is one from particularity to universality, from a sense of social rootedness to a universalist politics divorced from distinctions of race, class, and gender. Such a shift is unavailable to subsequent avant-gardists, to whom Yu next turns his attention. Chapter Two offers a reading of Silliman and his Ketjak to suggest that Language poetry, far from being just concerned with formal experimentation, is also strongly rooted in exploring working-class white male consciousness. Yu writes, "Silliman adapts to this new social landscape by ethnicizing the avant-garde, positing Language writing not simply as an aesthetic movement but as a social identity." Yu's analysis thus positions Language poetry as "a category equivalent to 'black writing' or 'women's writing'" (71), a position he argues Silliman has also acknowledged and struggled to reconcile with the distinctions often drawn between such categories.

The final three chapters of Yu's book offer the most provocative material for scholars of Asian American poetry and of multi-ethnic American writing more broadly. Yu argues that poetry, though at times denigrated as being disconnected from political praxis, was in fact central to the Asian American Movement's conception of activism. In Chapter Three, Yu turns his attention to three publications from the 1970s devoted to arts and literature--Gidra, Aion, and Bridge--that were at the center of Asian American activism and community-building but have since disappeared from the public scene. Yu reads 1970s experimental poetry by Francis Naohiko Oka, Lawson Fusao Inada, Janice Mirikitani, and Alan Chong Lau in these publications as instances of forging a new social identity for Asian Americans through language. Yu traces the nuances between the publications and the shifts that occur within them over the course of the decade, arguing that Asian American poets articulated racial and social identity through language in more open-ended and contested ways during those years. By the 1980s, an aesthetics associated with the personal, lyric voice and ethnic-signifier-heavy language came to dominate mainstream understandings of Asian American poetry.

In Chapter Four, Yu examines Cha's Dictee, tracing the history of its reception in experimental poetic and art circles first and then in Asian American literary studies in a poststructuralist moment. Offering a rich archive and overview of critical discussions of Cha's book, Yu suggests a way to read the emergence of Cha into critical consciousness--it is recognized first as an experimental text and then as an Asian American one--but argues that it is more fruitful to recognize that the text offers "neither a means of choosing between experimental and Asian American methods of reading and writing nor a synthesis of the two. Rather, in its multiple and often clashing structures of organization--linguistic, poetic, mythical, historical, personal--Dictee shows us a way of keeping these two paradigms in productive tension, always visible but never resolved." Echoing his larger argument in the book, Yu thus suggests that Dictee cannot be resolved in terms of its multiple avant-garde modes (experimental and Asian American) but must be read with a constant negotiation between "the strengths and weaknesses of different modes of literary and political affiliation" (122). Yu demonstrates in his reading of the text that such a negotiation is necessary in order to make sense of the entirety of Dictee, a task most critics do not attempt, focusing on one or the other section to forward the political and aesthetic agenda that is most in keeping with their own affinities.

Finally, Yu turns in Chapter Five to the poet Yau, whose work "shows us that Asian American avant-gardism is not a novelty of the late 1990s." Yu claims that Yau has "provided the first opportunity for most readers to recognize the existence of an Asian American avant-garde, and to read the presence of that avant-garde back into the very origins of Asian American writing" (138). Yu reads Yau's challenging poetics against the aesthetics of mainstream Asian American poetry that emerged in the 1980s, as embodied in Garrett Hongo's anthology The Open Boat (1993). While mainstream Asian American poets mobilize ethnic signifiers to solidify authorial subjectivity, Yau's use of such signifiers veers toward critique of their cliched registers to question the desire for a unified lyric speaker-subject. Engaging with popular culture manifestations of Asians such as Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto, Yau's poetry creates troubling figures like "Genghis Chan" (a mash-up of Earl Derr Biggers's detective Charlie Chan and the Mongol warrior Genghis Khan) and troubles the boundaries between the character Mr. Moto and Peter Lorre, the white actor who played him on screen.

In the past decade, scholars such as Juliana Chang, Dorothy Wang, Zhou Xiaojing, and Josephine Park have turned attention in Asian American literary studies toward poetry. Such a shift is long overdue, and Yu's book is an important contribution that foregrounds how Asian American poets engage with contemporary American poetics and culture. In particular, by focusing on the social identities constructed by these poets through their art, Yu maintains that poetry has social and political relevance that is deeply engaged with both form and content. Yu's work spurs other scholars to reorient their thinking about "experimental" versus "ethnic" poetry, and this book will certainly facilitate further work in the years to come.

Paul Lai

University of Saint Thomas

Lai, Paul

QUOTED: "Though this book at first appears narrowly focused, it manages to illuminate large areas of contemporary American poetry."

Yu, Timothy. Race and the avant-garde: experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965
D.D. Kummings
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 46.11 (July 2009): p2116.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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2008-29274 CIP

Yu, Timothy. Race and the avant-garde: experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965. Stanford, 2009. 192p bibl index afp ISBN 9780804759977, $45.00

Yu (Univ. of Toronto) claims that American poetry written since 1965 is less divided along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation than critics have supposed. The author concentrates on Asian American and so-called Language writers, arguing that their poems are not unrelated literary phenomena but parallel avant-garde formations. His central contention is that Language poets are just as concerned with racial identity as with matters of form and style and that Asian American poets are just as mindful of formal techniques as they are of issues of race. Among the poets whose work receives extended analysis are Allen Ginsherg, Ron Silliman, Janice Mirikitani, Lawson Fusao Inada, Francis Oka, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and John Yau. Mentioned but dismissed as indistinguishable from countless other poets in the "MFA mainstream" are such Asian Americans as Li-Young Lee, Cathy Song, Marilyn Chin, and David Mura. Though this book at first appears narrowly focused, it manages to illuminate large areas of contemporary American poetry. The book is perhaps most compelling when it links poetry to late-20thcentury social and political developments, for instance, the volatile situation during the late 1960s when the New Left fragmented into the competing, identity-conscious factions of the 1970s. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--D. D. Kummings, University of Wisconsin--Parkside

Kummings, D.D.

QUOTED: "Yu's definitions can be applied to any avant-garde movement."

Race and the avant-garde; experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965
Reference & Research Book News. 24.2 (May 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
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Full Text:
9780804759977

Race and the avant-garde; experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965.

Yu, Timothy.

Stanford U. Press

2009

192 pages

$45.00

Hardcover

Asian America

PS153

Yu (English, University of Toronto) redefines avant-garde poetry through both a social and aesthetic lens. He places the white male experimental work of the 1980s, particularly the Language school, in a parallel trajectory with Asian-American poets of the same time, who were using a variety of forms in their quest for self definition. Yu points out the artificiality of the barriers between various avant- garde groups and discusses the paradox of the radical fringe that achieves mainstream success. He concludes that one cannot speak of a single avant-garde, but many, each both experimental and ethnicized. While he stresses the work of Asian-American writers, Yu's definitions can be applied to any avant-garde movement.

([c]2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)

"100 Chinese Silences." Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, p. 132. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456344714&it=r&asid=ffdb2794f2c1c6766d6e0100da7dc406. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017. Leonard, Keith D. "By Any Other Name: Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965." Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 56, no. 3, 2010, p. 428+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA252635510&it=r&asid=0a5e2507cc39cf5371e5198466c09048. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017. Lai, Paul. "Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965." MELUS, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, p. 209+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA229543302&it=r&asid=0c79fb7bb4c560d6146956dfbe7b2e2d. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017. Kummings, D.D. "Yu, Timothy. Race and the avant-garde: experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2009, p. 2116. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA266632519&it=r&asid=3c08a07f9fbc440ec0f1bba94dcdc8e3. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017. "Race and the avant-garde; experimental and Asian American poetry since 1965." Reference & Research Book News, May 2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA199021731&it=r&asid=14a7d0f6a40a24b2b873354b516b8438. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.

• Hyphen
  http://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2016/06/books-100-chinese-silences-timothy-yu
  Word count: 1480

  QUOTED: "Characterized by excoriating wit and a meticulous attention to detail, the collection serves as a hilarious and wide-ranging index of appropriation and marginalization of Asian and Asian American voices, stories and symbols in the Western literary canon. Yu approaches this collection with surgical precision by taking on the original poems line-by-line."
  "Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences is a vital voice among this chorus that is growing louder by the minute speaking, singing and shouting the new sound of what it means to be Asian in America -- which, as the book shows, has real stakes not only for Asian Americans but for anyone who is invested in the future of American poetry, indeed, the future of the American imagination."

  BOOKS: '100 CHINESE SILENCES' BY TIMOTHY YU
  Leah Silvieus
  June 30, 2016
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  100 Chinese Silences
  When I attended the Kundiman poetry retreat in summer 2012, Timothy Yu read one of the poems that would eventually become part of his book 100 Chinese Silences. I had heard nothing like it before, and even though what would become 100 Chinese Silences was just a handful of poems back then, I sensed the importance of the collection and predicted that it would mark a significant change in the dialogue about Asians and Asian Americans in poetry, even though I was unsure of how or when. Until now.
  The collection takes its title from a Billy Collins poem, “Grave.” In the poem, the speaker stands before the graves of his parents and asks them what they think of his new glasses, the response to which is silence, one of the “one hundred kinds of silence / according to the Chinese belief, / each one distinct from the others […]” Toward the end of the poem, the speaker admits to have “just made up the business of the one hundred Chinese silences.” Yu’s book takes those imaginary Chinese silences and transforms them into “testament[s] / to the noise of being Asian in America.” (“Chinese Silence No. 12”) Yu’s approach is brilliant in its wide-ranging survey of orientalist tropes in literature and public speech, referring to poets from Pound to Mary Oliver and public figures such as Marco Rubio.
  As Yu says in an interview with The Volta: “In parodying the poems, I was beginning from the limited place that this orientalist discourse gave me to speak -- a place of ‘silence’ -- and seeing if I could elbow my way out of it, not by condemning it from the outside but from writing within it, trying to make it take itself apart.”
  Throughout the collection, Yu addresses the spectrum of Asian American stereotypes, from “yellow peril” (“Chinese Silence No. 95” after Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”), to sexless sage: “Now that you’re old, it’s time to turn Chinese / and cultivate a neutered silence” (“Chinese Silence No. 37” after Tony Barnstone’s “Get Zen”). He also takes on the dual stereotypes of the Asian woman who is both submissive mistress who “totters on tiny feet to you” (“Chinese Silence No.66), as well as the insidiously scheming “Tiger Wife” (in Chinese Silence No. 26, a brilliant address to Wendi Deng that metrically echoes Blake’s “The Tyger”). Characterized by excoriating wit and a meticulous attention to detail, the collection serves as a hilarious and wide-ranging index of appropriation and marginalization of Asian and Asian American voices, stories and symbols in the Western literary canon. Yu approaches this collection with surgical precision by taking on the original poems line-by-line, sometimes word-by-word and even syllable-by-syllable, in order to vivisect the white orientalist fantasy. In doing so, he reveals how fragile -- and sometimes ridiculous -- the fantasy is.
  In “Chinese Silence No. 64,” Yu offers a line-by-line parody of Collins’s “Orient.” Here, I offer them both for comparison:
  Collins:
  You are turning me
  like someone turning a globe in her hand,
  and yes, I have another side
  like a China no one,
  not even me, has ever seen.
  Yu:
  I am turning me
  like someone pirouetting on little bound feet
  and yes, I have a backside
  that looks like China
  inscrutable even to me
  Image result for timothy yu
  Photo of the author by Robin Valenza
  The collection also serves as a kind of inverse ars poetica of the Orientalist poem as Yu addresses the ways in which poets have appropriated ways of trying to make their poems “more Asian.” By breaking down and essentially unmaking the Orientalist poem, Yu reveals what is at stake in this kind of cultural appropriation. In Chinese Silence No. 36, for example, he addresses Tony Barnstone’s comments about writing a Chinese poem in English, by spinning ever more extreme analogies:
  To make a French poem in English
  we must impale ourselves upon the Tour Eiffel
  until our bloodcurdling screams evoke that sublime
  je ne sais quoi
  The poem concludes by illustrating what underlies this kind of cultural appropriation, which is the extent to which the American imagination has failed itself and thus employs Orientalist tropes to silence “creepy” edges and to mirror its own failure and lack of imagination “as if it were gold”:
  To make an American poem in Chinese
  we must silence its creepy edges
  and raise an iron-built mountain that mirrors
  our own negation to us as if it were gold.
  The ways in which Yu addresses the creation and appropriation of the Orientalist fantasy reveals not just what it is to be Asian in America but the ways in which otherization is a means of expressing anxiety about the authenticity and stability of the idea of “Americanness” in general. “Chinese Silence No. 77” includes an epigraph from Bruce Cohen, who read ancient Chinese poets to “shock [himself] into some alien sensibility” and “aspired to be un-American while remaining nostalgic.” The poem addresses the problematic ways in which poets appropriate Chinese culture as a kind of mystical amulet to protect themselves from what they perceive as their own cultural ennui or inauthenticity and exposes the underlying anxiety that “it is / Impossible / To ever become / One hundred percent American.”
  To return to the beginning of the collection -- Billy Collins’ “Grave” could be read, on one level, as a casual and somewhat careless appropriation of Orientalist tropes -- on a deeper and perhaps more tragic level, the poem could serve as an indicator of the breakdown of the white American imagination. Cultures and communities preserve their sense of self through the stories they tell about themselves, their traditions, and their ancestors. The speaker in “Grave,” is unable to connect with his own parents through stories of his own and subsequently appropriates those of an “Other” -- which not only marginalizes Asian Americans but also reveals, perhaps more poignantly, the extent to which the speaker is alienated from his own personal, familial, and cultural history. Through parodying poems like “Grave,” Yu reveals what’s really at stake in them, and that these stakes matter -- not only to Asian Americans but to those who perpetrate such appropriation. As Paulo Freire remarks in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, dehumanization marks both the oppressor and the oppressed: by refusing to acknowledge the voices and authenticity of others, the dominant class restricts the extent to which its own members may become fully human themselves.
  100 Chinese Silences demonstrates that cultural appropriation has real stakes: tossed-off references to culture, place and history can hold real meaning for real people with real voices. And increasingly, these people -- who are also writers, scholars, performers and activists -- are using their platforms not just to speak back from their silences in the margins but also to place the margins at the center of the conversation. We need only look to the swift and wide-ranging response of the Asian American community to Calvin Trillin’s poem “Have They Run Out Provinces Yet?” Within 24 hours of The New Yorker publishing the poem, Asian Americans began to respond in a variety of forums that included the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Smithsonian Asian American Center as well as in social media and in prestigious national and international publications. Yu himself responded in an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered and through a feature in The New Republic.
  Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences is a vital voice among this chorus that is growing louder by the minute speaking, singing and shouting the new sound of what it means to be Asian in America -- which, as the book shows, has real stakes not only for Asian Americans but for anyone who is invested in the future of American poetry, indeed, the future of the American imagination.

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/100-chinese-silences/
  Word count: 235

  100 Chinese Silences

  Reviewed by Matt Sutherland
  May 27, 2016

  All nature of tired, absurd stereotypes of China and her people maintain a hold on the minds of most Americans, even as China’s superpower ascendancy has dominated headlines for some twenty-five years. With weaponized pen, Timothy Yu set off on a one-hundred poem crusade to heap ridicule and brilliant insight at Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, Billy Collins, and other purveyors of Far East falsities. Yu is director of Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  Chinese Silence No. 37
  after Tony Barnstone, “Get Zen”

  Get laid, you think. Or try. Indulge your lusts.
  Think of a joke: What do you say to Freud
  When he comes to your weiner stand, bill poised
  For payment? “Sometimes a hot dog is just
  a hot dog.” Easier to close your eyes
  and think of Buddha, roly-poly gut
  and empty loins—he’s kind of like you but
  on purpose, not a loser full of sighs.
  Gratification is a young man’s game.
  Now that you’re old, it’s time to turn Chinese
  and cultivate a neutered silence. Pleased
  to make an Eastern virtue of your sad-
  sack self! You don’t really think desire’s bad;
  self-pity’s just better in Buddha’s name.

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