Anna Maria Hong

Reading by Don Mee Choi

'My tongue, your tongue is already an aggregate.'

Don Mee Choi and her brother, from Hardly War

About sixty people gathered in Bennington College’s Tishman Lecture Hall on the evening of November 28, 2018 for Don Mee Choi’s reading for the Poetry at Bennington series, mostly professors, students, and local artists and poets including Mary Ruefle and the painter and collagist Mary Lum.

Tweens: Asian American Poetry & Poetics in the 2010s From now through the end of March, I will be writing short commentaries on live events and recent poetry collections by Asian Pacific Islander American poets. I’m focusing on this period, as we begin a new year toward the end of a decade full of upheaval and rife with the feeling of imminent doom, which happens to have been a particularly rich era for publication by APIA poets with a widening of aesthetic approaches and styles, ethnic diversification beyond the first waves of APIA writing, and a burgeoning of voices young and established.

A few of my commentaries will feature interviews with the directors and editors of some of the Asian American literary venues and organizations that have abetted this boon. Some commentaries will also feature visual art by APIA artists, beginning with this banner image of Generations: 500 hundred human years in dogs/trade by the Seattle-based artist Saya Moriyasu (many thanks to the G. Gibson Gallery). My goal is not to provide a comprehensive survey, which is of course impossible, but to briefly investigate some of the currents in this literary sound.

I’ve invoked the word tweens partly because I like the youthful connotations of the word, which seem to aptly evoke this energetic resurgence, and partly to unsettle the old positing of Asian Americans as living “between two worlds,” which always struck me as off the mark, while sincerely trying to get at some real feeling of unbelonging. Tweens also references this young decade of the twenty-first century (between ten and twenty) as well as my interest in hybrid forms that blend poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, that speak to history and personal experience. Many of the works that I’ll examine here will do that. Thank you for visiting, viewing, and reading, and a felicitous 2019 to you and yours.

Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America's 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize and was published by Sidebrow Books in May 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in early 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry, fiction, and essay in The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry,and many other places. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American, an anthology of fiction and memoir. She joined the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018 and is a board member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

The International Examiner