Wei, Joseph
MWF 1 :50 PM
Park Hall 0251
Asian American Poetry
This course is an introduction to poetry via Asian American poetry. We’ll be studying Asian American poets from a variety of historical periods and ethnicities who have used poetry as a vehicle for the creation and articulation of an Asian American voice. Our goal is to learn the underlying conventions that enable poems to have the meanings and effects they do for readers—in short, poetics, or how poems work. While we’ll learn about familiar poetic conventions like meter, rhyme, form, etc., our discussion of Asian American poetics will also intersect with questions of race, gender, sexuality, commodification, language, history, diaspora, the literary marketplace (canons, awards, reception, etc.), and more. As we’ll find, the aesthetics of Asian American poetry is inseparable from the politics of Asian American experiences; the two dovetail in Asian American poetic expression as these poets try to find a language to articulate identities, interrogate personal and collective histories, and imagine possible futures.