Download Remote Parsee: Writing on Asian American Literature (1992-2002)
Introduction
There is a peculiar condition that attaches to criticism written on the move — written, that is, by someone who is also in the process of becoming. The essays and reviews collected in Remote Parsee: Writing on Asian American Literature (1992–2002) were composed during one of the more restless and consequential decades in the history of American poetry, by a poet who was himself arriving at his own aesthetic at the same time he was attempting to map someone else’s. To read them now is to encounter a mind in productive argument with a field that had not yet finished forming.
The decade in question was a charged one for Asian American letters. The early 1990s saw the publication of several landmark anthologies — Garrett Hongo’s The Open Boat (1993), Walter K. Lew’s Premonitions (1995), Jessica Hagedorn’s Charlie Chan Is Dead (1993) — each one a different wager about what Asian American literature was for and who it was speaking to. These were not merely publishing events; they were interventions in an ongoing argument about aesthetic value, political obligation, and the relationship between artistic form and communal identity. That argument had deep roots. It stretched back at least to the combative manifestoes of the Aiiieeeee! anthologies in the 1970s, which established a canon organized around themes of cultural reclamation and masculine assertion, and forward to the growing presence of writers — John Yau, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge — whose work could not be easily assimilated to that model.
Into this argument the essays here intervene from an unusual angle. The author is a poet steeped in the New American Poetry, in Language poetics, in the avant-garde traditions running from Gertrude Stein through Charles Olson through the New York School — and he brings that formation to bear on a body of literature that had often been evaluated by different, more sociologically oriented criteria. The central tension in these pages is not between Asian American writing and some external “mainstream,” but between two competing theories of what literature can do within Asian American culture itself: one that sees poetry and fiction as instruments of collective representation, and another that sees formal innovation — opacity, fragmentation, the derangement of ordinary syntax — as itself a political act, perhaps the most powerful one available to a writer working within a language that has historically been used to contain and diminish them.
This is not an abstract debate in these pages. It runs through every review, animating the praise and the occasional impatience in equal measure. The earliest pieces, written for small journals in 1992 and 1993, find the critic testing his bearings against a rapidly shifting literary landscape. The opening essay — published in the short-lived 2nd Generation — reviews four books at once: Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp, Jessica Hagedorn’s Danger and Beauty, John Yau’s Edificio Sayonara, and the Hongo anthology. The range of the books sets the terms for everything that follows. Of Inada — often cited as the first Asian American poet published in a complete collection by a major press — the essays return again and again, finding in his minimalist “legends” of the Japanese American internment a model for how formal restraint can carry historical weight without collapsing into documentary. “In creating his mythology of the internment camps,” the review notes, “rather than construct an epic narrative centered around himself, he creates a sense of grandeur out of short ‘legends.'” Inada’s haiku-like elegies for jazz musicians — “Hold a microphone / Close to the moon,” he writes of Billie Holiday — suggest what a genuinely hybrid poetics, rooted simultaneously in the Japanese tradition and the Black American avant-garde, might look like. He is, as the title essay later puts it, the “Langston Hughes-meets-Guillaume Apollinaire of Asian American poetry.”
The reviews of Hagedorn and Yau are equally revealing for what they disclose about the critic’s own aesthetic commitments. Hagedorn gets credit for a poetry “immune from the bland political dogmatism that can mar poems attempting to convey the anger of minority experience” — immune because her humor and her acceptance of contradiction short-circuit the moralizing impulse. Yau is praised for something more technically specific: his capacity to “construct monologues which control paradox as much as they surrender themselves to confusion,” poems in which “personality” seems to reside in the poem itself rather than behind it, as if language were behaving according to its own nature with the poet merely present as a kind of medium. The early review of Yau’s Edificio Sayonara already contains the seed of the long analysis in the title essay: the idea that Yau’s surrealism is not decorative but structural, a way of staging the split between the racialized body and the literary tradition that claims to transcend it.
The review of Hagedorn’s anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead cuts in a different direction, finding much of the collected fiction too smoothly comfortable, its “cool irony” too easily achieved — a “thoughtless listing of detail, colorless mechanical dialogue.” The sharpness here, uncharacteristic of the reviewing-as-boosterism that often marks minority literary culture, reflects a conviction that runs through all these essays: that literary quality and political necessity are not the same thing, and that confusing them does a disservice to both. An unpublished essay on Hongo’s introduction to The Open Boat develops this point at length, taking issue with Hongo’s tendency to measure the health of Asian American poetry by its absorption into institutional prestige — prizes, textbooks, appearances in the New York Times Magazine. “Recognition in it often signals the end, or the late middle-age, of a vital artistic movement,” the essay argues, and suggests that what Hongo fails to account for is the difference between “the white reaction against the bourgeois” and “the minority reaction against the bourgeois,” which the essay identifies as possessing a “true vitality” Hongo’s framework cannot accommodate.
The section on Korean American poetry — first published in Seoro Bulletin in 1993 — is in some ways the most polemical piece in the collection, challenging an earlier critic’s sweeping claim that Korean American writers had “yet to dare the assumptions of language.” Against this, the essay invokes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, both then out of print, as evidence of an existing tradition of formal daring the critic had simply failed to read. The argument is less about any particular writer than about the critical paradigm itself — the sociological reading that evaluates literature primarily as testimony, and mistakes unfamiliarity with absence. The “only through a writer’s association with these near-invisible properties in language,” the essay insists, can the lived experience of racism and cultural dislocation be genuinely confronted — not through the surface politics of who the subject is, but through the deeper politics of how language itself is inhabited and troubled.
The epistolary exchange with the Canadian poet Fred Wah — published under the title “Philly Talk 7” — is the most intimate and theoretically sustained piece in the book, a long back-and-forth conducted by email in the lead-up to a joint reading in Philadelphia in 1998. Wah, who studied at Buffalo with Olson and Creeley and whose work the title essay later describes as finding a “nexus where a Mallarméan poetics of the sign-as-mind meets the proprioceptive poetics of an Olson,” poses a set of questions about form, racialization, and the lyric that the letters turn over from every angle. The discussion touches on bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, and the differences between American and Canadian responses to Language poetry, with Wah suggesting that Canadian poets never felt the same imperative to “clean house” — to sacrifice the bodily, speech-based dimensions of poetry to the demands of linguistic self-critique — in part because the landscape and the “local” continued to provide syntactic grounding for the argument. The letters are full of the kind of thinking that doesn’t survive polishing, and their unfinished, speculative quality is precisely their value.
The short reviews collected in the middle section of the book — published mainly in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter through the late 1990s — cover a remarkable range. Tan Lin’s Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe is described as “completely postmodern — indebted to contemporaries, but not relying on distancing ironizations to declare its latecoming,” a writing devoted “very much to fun, but which is learned and malleable.” Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel is read as reducing its characters “to a series of gestures,” its “impossibly long sentences” piling observation upon observation in a mathematical rigor that amounts to something like an anthropology of late-capitalist subjectivity. Myung Mi Kim’s Dura is praised for synthesizing “the fruits of a linguistically radical poetics with the emotive, emphatic gestures and tones of an activist poetics, attentive to the particulars of group, place, and time” — its list poems (“Swag drum / Inland filth / Surmise commodity / Anemic shed”) offering the particulars of experience before any totalizing structure arrives to explain them. Sianne Ngai’s Criteria, Frances Chung’s posthumous Crazy Melon, Jose Garcia Villa’s The Anchored Angel, Dominic Cheung’s Drifting, and Hung Tu’s Verisimilitude all receive sustained attention — each review asking not what the work represents but what it makes possible.
The title essay — “Remote Parsee: A Grammar of Alternative Asian North American Poetry,” originally published in the University of Alabama Press collection Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s (2001) — is the intellectual culmination of the collection, gathering a decade’s worth of reading into an argument about the formal and political dimensions of experimental writing by Asian and Asian North American poets. It moves across a wide field: from the pioneering and half-forgotten Ronald Tanaka, whose late-1970s essays for the Journal of Ethnic Studies on “communication stress” as resistance anticipate Language poetics without having read it; to John Yau’s migration from a “self-decimating Orientalism” toward a lyric subjectivity that treats the Self and the Other as “parallel agents”; to Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s long-lined phenomenological investigations in which the perceiving mind reduces its own agency to that of a camera lens; to the work of the Canadian writers — the visionary Roy Kiyooka, who assembled out of “an extremely wide range of writing styles” a hybrid idiom that confronted state power with the opacities of ellipsis, and Fred Wah, whose “alienethnic” poetics, as Jeff Derksen describes it, is “oppositional in the sense of engaging an avant-garde position” while “differential in the sense that it recognizes difference without integrating it grammatically into a larger unit such as national identity.”
Central to the essay’s argument is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, which serves here as something like the vanishing point toward which many of the other writers converge without knowing it. Cha’s book — flipping, in the essay’s description, “from photographs of a Korean martyr to Mallarméan writings in both French and English, from diagrams of the inner workings of the throat to images of scribbled-over earlier versions” of the text itself — is read not as an experimental curiosity but as the fullest realization of what the essay calls the poetics of the “unreliable witness”: a writing in which languages themselves, French as both the colonial tongue of Vietnam and the arbiter of Western knowledge, become a kind of content. The essay traces Cha’s belated discovery by the Asian American critical establishment, quoting Elaine Kim’s own retrospective confession that she had once sought in these literatures “unifying thematic threads and tidy resolutions,” heedless of what was being excluded from that “homogenizing approach.” Walter K. Lew, who recognized early the fecundity of Cha’s techniques and whose editorial vision shaped Premonitions as something like a counteranthology — organized around “a wide range of rapidly juxtaposed languages, media, historical frameworks, motifs and rhetorical moods” — is given his due here as perhaps the single most important enabling figure for the alternative tradition the essay traces.
The title comes from the Vancouver poet Jam Ismail: “descended on all sides from the Idiosyncrasy, the kid disdained grammar class, refused to parse, opted to be remote parsee.” It is a characteristically compressed image — the refusal to parse (to submit to grammatical authority, to be analyzed and categorized) expressed through the pun on Parsee, the Zoroastrian diaspora. The remote parsee is the one who cannot be parsed by the dominant system, who exists at an angle to every available identity. It is an apt emblem for the writers this book attends to most closely, and for the critical stance it embodies: engaged but eccentric, passionate but resistant to the settling of accounts that official criticism requires.
These are occasional pieces — reviews for small magazines, essays for literary journals, published between 1992 and 2002 — and they carry the virtues of that form: the pressure of a deadline, the sharpness that comes from having to make a case in a limited space, the intimacy of a writer addressing a presumed community of readers. They were written by someone who was simultaneously publishing his own poetry, translating Rimbaud, and absorbing the debates of the New York poetry world while remaining attentive to the specifically West Coast and pan-Pacific dimensions of Asian American literary production. They do not pretend to comprehensiveness. They are a record of sustained attention, over a decade, to a literature that was in the process of discovering what it could do — and, in the best moments, so is the criticism itself.
—Claude (Sonnet 4.6: High)
June 7, 2026, 3:11 pm
Los Angeles