Ekphrasis and Whiteness in Recent American Poetry

( Robert Grotjohn ) 한국영어영문학회 2014 영어 영문학 Vol.60 No.3

The ekphrastic has become a frequent exercise for contemporary American poets. This study adds to the growing research on varieties of ekphrasis by discussing the various functions of whiteness in works by four poets. Natasha Trethewey, in her most recent volume, Thrall (2012), offers a series of poems inspired by 17th- and 18th-century Latin American casta paintings, which depict and catalogue variations of mixed-race couples and their children. After considering the eclipsing of whiteness in Trethewey’s “ethnic ekphrasis,” I will turn to the whiteness in Robert Hass’s ekphrastic on Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk titled “Art and Life,” from his National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning collection Time & Materials (2008), as an example of “elliptical ekphrasis.” The play on whiteness continues with Alice Fulton’s “fractal ekphrasis in “Close,” from her volume Felt (2001), in which she considers Joan Mitchell’s White Territory, an abstract expressionist painting. Finally, Harryette Mullens’ “Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language” from Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), challenges the traditions of the ekphrastic and of poetry itself in her “post-ethnic/postekphrastic ekphrasis.”

Song as “Event” in Ed Bok Lee’s Poetry

Robert Grotjohn 21세기영어영문학회 2013 21세기영어영문학회 학술대회 Vol.2013 No.09

A Hegemon’s Privilege: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and John Ashbery’s Three Poems

Robert David Grotjohn 한국T.S.엘리엇학회 2014 T.S. 엘리엇 연구 Vol.24 No.1

John Ashbery’s Three Poems can be read as a postmodern response to T. S. Eliot’s modernist Four Quartets. Eliot builds his poem on the lyric impulse to create a moment of stillness in the midst of temporal flow, and that lyric impulse gains a specifically Christian center when Eliot identifies the “Incarnation” as the ultimate “still point” of “the turning world.” A close examination of Three Poems shows Ashbery echoing particular language and ideas of Four Quartets in order to deconstruct the lyric desire as well as Eliot’s Christian assertion of a fixed center that counters our temporal entrapment. While Eliot’s Eurocentric fixation on a Christian world-view creates problematic implications for non-Western readers in elevating that world-view over their own cultural constructions, Ashbery’s more egalitarian emphasis might be read as more open to non-Western cultural constructions. However, Ashbery’s apolitical absorption in the subject, especially the decentered subject, might be just as problematic in its own Eurocentrism. As critiques of postmodernism have argued, the decentered identity of the postmodern subject was privileged just as non-Western and ethnic populations were giving voice to their own identities. Ashbery’s apolitical subjectivity suggests a hegemon’s pleasure in self-exploration, however digressive and decentered that self might be, and marks a privileged Western position. Ashbery’s anti-hierarchical and exploratory critique of Eliot might suggest a way to a more successful aesthetic opposition to Eurocentricity, but it does not take that way itself.

Recognizing Korean American Poets: Cathy Park Hong, Suji Kwock Kim, and Ethnic Nationalism

( Robert Grotjohn ) 한국아메리카학회 2013 美國學論集 Vol.45 No.1

This essay considers the South Korean academic reception of two Korean American poets, Suji Kwock Kim and Cathy Park Hong. Even though Hong is the much more accomplished poet in terms of her production, Kim has received much more attention in the Korean academy. The shared tenor of the attention to Kim shows what Shu-mei Shih calls “technologies of recognition,” those reading practices that make some works visible and others invisible as worthy objects of study. The Korean scholarly attention to Kim all shares versions of nationalist reading strategies, and Kim is usually assimilated into the Korean nation by Korean critics. Hong resists such assimilationist reading practices, asserting her difference from the Korean nation and collective. That assertion of difference, which might create the “ugly feeling” of “irritation” identified by Sianne Ngai, might also make her invisible to nationalist “technologies of recognition.” That assertion also shows the way to reading her as a representation of an increasingly multicultural Korea, however, since recent shifts in immigration law now include overseas Koreans even more emphatically in the Korean nation. As such a representation, Hong`s work should be included in Korean scholarship because it helps readers to think through recent challenges to Korean homogeneity by globalization.

21st Century Korean American PoetryThe First Decade

Robert David Grotjohn 한국현대영미시학회 2018 현대영미시연구 Vol.24 No.1

The main purposes of this essay are to compile a bibliography of all the book-length collections of English-language Korean American poetry that have been published in the U.S. through 2017, to outline some possible means of categorizing or classifying the books, and to briefly introduce the work of each poet who published his or her first collection in the first decade of the 21st century. In suggesting various possibilities for categorizing these poets, I insist that none of those possibilities are definitive or absolute. From 1972 to 2017, 47 Korean American poets published 84 collections of poetry, 17 in the 20th century, 27 from 2000 to 2009, and 40 from 2010 to 2017. Key suggestions for classification include a poet’s generation in America, gender, themes, content, and aesthetic choices. The fruitful diversity of Korean American poetry reflects the state of American poetry in general. The extent to which the poets use or ignore their Korean heritage is part of that larger diversity but also shows a unique place in the various poetic and intellectual communities to which the writers might belong.

Arthur Sze`s Taoist Poetic

( Robert Grotjohn ) 21세기영어영문학회 2013 영어영문학21 Vol.26 No.3

Arthur Sze is a prolific, award-winning, but under-studied Asian American poet whose work does not fit comfortably into any of the past or current paradigms of Asian American aesthetics. This essay examines the ways in which Sze translates Asian influences into his own Asian American aesthetic. He performs that translation through actual translation of Tang Dynasty poets, through building into his own poetry connections between the great and the small, the distant and the near that parallel those connections in the Tang poets, and through a blending of his American poetry into a Taoistic poetic. With a focus on the poetic sequence “The Redshifting Web,” this essay illuminates ways to read Sze`s poetry through those influences, the ways his poems create an Asian ancestral container for his American poetic. The essay finishes by offering possibilities for future study of Sze`s ways of gathering his American poetic forbears into his Asian-influenced aesthetic.

Intertexts in Korean-American Adoptee Poetry: Sun Yung Shin and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

( Robert Grotjohn ) 21세기영어영문학회 2011 영어영문학21 Vol.24 No.2

The Korean American adoptee poets Sun Yung Shin in Skirt Full of Black and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs in Paper Pavilion create "intertexts" through a disruptive textual biopolitics as defined by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth; Kristevan intertextuality helps illuminate the ways in which the biopolitics is enacted in the poetry. The poetry challenges administrative textualities that document and produce the orphan and the adoptee. Those documents of biopower and their accompanying narratives are normative textualities that regularize (or regulate) the adoptive situation. Because the texts that create orphans and adoptees are often incomplete and/or inaccurate, the space in which the adoptee himself or herself existed is often untexted. This untexted space is a subaltern space. Dobbs and Shin occupy and speak from that space in an oppositional intertextuality, a biopolitical poetics that fragments and disrupts normative textualities, recalling Kristeva`s original formulation of intertextuality as "transposition." In affinal intertextualities the poets help to create a "commons" through resonance between the two volumes and into discourses that include the larger transnational adoptive and Asian American communities. Shin and Dobbs write as part of the disruptive multitude. Their poems model resistant writing, helping create a commons that, to adapt Eleana Kim`s phrase, contributes to a biopolitics of belonging.

Music, Memory, and Transgression in Ed Bok Lee’s Poetry

Robert David Grotjohn 한국현대영미소설학회 2013 현대영미소설 Vol.20 No.3

This study uses research on collective memory, music and memory, transnationalism, and transgressive pedagogy to consider the ways in which the Korean American poet Ed Bok Lee presents music as a means of passing on collective memory and critiquing contemporary Korean popular culture. He identifies such memories as giving him a Korean “orientation of the soul” that he inherits from his parents, and he depicts that orientation in poems set in the U.S., especially “Inside Lake Heron,” from Real Karaoke People (2005). He claims to find that orientation most especially in the countryside when he returns to Korea. That orientation turns to disorientation in the cityscape of contemporary Seoul, as depicted through the musical motifs of “Chosun 5.0,” from Whorled (2011). Lee presents hallyu, particularly its musical manifestations, as a consumerist project that neglects Korean culture and history. Participation in that project through the unreflective consumption of k-pop and other manifestations of hallyu, implicates students in the neoliberal global economies that enforce “repetitions of the same” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) through the “liturgical” (Jan Assmann) reinforcement of that sameness. While Lee's poems can contribute to a transgressive, progressive pedagogy as advocated by Hyeyurn Chung and King-kok Cheung, one must also be aware of Lee's essentializing “orientation.” On the terms suggested by Donald Pease, Lee's essential tradition demonstrates that the transnational is also inescapably diasporic.

Intertext as Identity in Korean-American Adoption Poetry : Sun Yung Shin and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

Robert Grotjohn 21세기영어영문학회 2010 21세기영어영문학회 학술대회 Vol.2010 No.09

Speculative Poetics on the Post-Racial Frontier : Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire

Robert Grotjohn 21세기영어영문학회 2013 21세기영어영문학회 학술대회 Vol.2013 No.03