Reading Yoko Ono's Grapefruit bits at a time, we talk more and more about how Yoko is the opposite of the Korean grocer's wife, the Vietnamese nail salon worker, the Filipina domestic worker, and how most of us are located somewhere in between what I've set up here as binary opposites. This is of course no fault of Yoko's, having the privilege and visibility that she has. But I think about how tempting it must be for readers, for those who inhabit poetry and art scenes, to see the work of a Yoko Ono, and place her in a position as the representative Asian American woman artist of the avant garde.
I thought about this again, as I've been trying to string some words together concisely on Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's "elegant" use of the poetic line in Four Year Old Girl. I am having epistemological issues articulating anything concise about Berssenbrugge; I don't know now where she has discussed loading a long poetic line with emotional content and imparting that sentiment upon readers, who may or may not retain the long lines' specific details. Where did I read this, or is this something I've simply concluded from my own inability to retain specific details from her lines? Is this my way of comforting myself that I just can't easily access her work?
I bring up Yoko Ono and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge in the same breath because I am thinking again of avant garde Asian American women artists/poets, and what names typically come to mind in larger poetic and artistic circles (that is, larger than APIA poetry scenes). Not like the works of these two have too much in common. I'd think, for example, that the elements of the naiveté and public openness of Yoko Ono's Grapefruit (...there's the sky; it's a poem. Go outside, and give somebody on the streets a bag of seeds; this is a poem.) are not so present in Berssenbrugge's Four Year Old Girl, which I think is set in a less populated and much quieter space, and by the way, I'd have to reread before I try to say anything more about it here.
I bring this up now because so much potentially good discussion, as well as gummy tripe and vague bullshit, have passed through my inbox, regarding Poetry and Politics, Schools of Poetry, Poetic Movements, Poet Communities, Ethnic Identifiers, Pedagogy and Poetics, and I wish people would instead be more open to substantiating the above through participation in critical discussions about the specifics of poetic works, what we see working and not working in a poem, a body of poems, a performance, what is executed effectively/successfully or not, why and how, rather than throwing around abstract blanket overgeneralization and unsubstantiated jargon, and rather than fixating on labels, on scene, on charisma, on personalities, on chisme. But that's just me, trying to learn or understand or articulate something concrete ultimately about my own poetics. That's just me, being a poet.
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Oh, and as for the "Popular Culture" portion of this blog post. While awaiting the arrival of Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel Criterion DVD which is to be released very soon, we have been revisiting the X-Files. Remember when I blew some of my grad school student loan money on the entire nine seasons of X-Files DVD's, which I bought on eBay from some guy in Hong Kong? Yeah, those DVD's. I am officially Dana Scully's personal fashion police. Fannie pack, leggings, white Reeboks, and a scrunchie in one episode, OMFG. And hey, it was the 90's so high waisted pleated slacks were in.
