Asian American Poetry

Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics
Author(s): Shirley Lim

Source: MELUS, Vol. 14, No. 2, Theory, Culture and Criticism (Summer, 1987), pp. 51-63
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry:
A Case For Ethnopoetics
Shirley Lim
Westchester Community College
When asked what she considered the main obstacle facing Asian-
American writers today, Maxine Hong Kingston said, "Seeing through
false images so that you can write about what is really there. White
people and Asians can overwhelm you telling who you are - stereotypes
and ethnocentric figments" (World Press Review, 62). Alan Lelchuck,
writing on "The Death of the Jewish Novel," attacks the fashion for
ethnic writing even more sharply. "Need it be said, at this late date, that
the return to one's origins by itself is not enough to sustain a book's
literary interest, let alone make it a work of art?" Besides, he adds, "To
miss out on (the) human dilemma and concentrate on the newly dis-
covered meaning of this or that ethnic ceremony is to sacrifice literary
possibility for sentimentality" (28).
It is ironic that these two writers who have benefited from the critical
movement to open the canon to minority writers also see the personal
and critical dangers besetting writing presented to a larger public as
ethnic in origin. Their response is understandable, for the problem raised
in an ethnocentric reading of a text, especially a modern text, is a
politically dangerous one. Taking Asian-American poetry as the prov-
ince for my discussion, how is it possible to identify the sources of
Asian-American literary effects without falling into the trap of identify-
ing Asian-Americans as "special" or "different" and so unwittingly con-
firming racist commonplaces? Even positive appreciations can be seen as
patronizing or embarrassing to those of Asian descent.
Nonetheless, the case for an ethnocentered reading applies to Asian-
American poetry as it surely does to Native American or Black American
poetry: ethnocentric readings of literature produced by non-Anglo-
American minorities is one general way in which the inherent bias of the
Anglo-American mainstream can be corrected. And the correction is
necessary not purely for ideological reasons but to enrich our common
literary culture by creating readers capable of appreciating the literary
works of other ethnic groups.' The pedagogical task in forming an
MELUS, Volume 14, No. 2 (Summer 1987).
52 SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM
ethnopoetics to approach certain bodies of writing is not separate from

recent critical revisions but is very much a product, albeit particularized,
of the schools of reading communities, reader-based criticism, and phe-
nomenological theory (see works of Stanley Fish, Robert Crosman, and
Wolfgang Iser, for example).2
Against the ideal reader attuned to complex ethnographic details of a
specific text, we find critics such as Gerald Haslam who asserts "Most
literary work of Asian-Americans is written in English and is clearly
Western in technique, reflecting very little non-European influence"(79).
In support of this critical comment, Haslam cites the poetry of Jose
Garcia Villa, a Filipino poet who came to the United States in 1930 to
attend college and whose work reflects so little of his ethnic background
that he is often mistaken for Hispanic or Latino. Another critic could
make a contrary argument based on Villa's passionate mysticism, but
this is only to beg the question, for for every Villa, there are dozens of
Asian-American poets whose poetry shows a distinctive non-European
character so foreign that even the most trained of Anglo-American
readers can miss it if they are not familiar with the cultural context in
which the works reside. Examining the works of over fifty Asian-
American poets, works which have appeared in over sixty single collec-
tions and a half dozen specialized anthologies as well as numerous
magazines, it becomes obvious to me that Haslam's critical generaliza-
tion is inaccurate, for the chief denominator of the majority of these
works is the non-European character underlying their diverse styles,
themes and forms.3
The non-European cast of Asian-American poetry, even from second
and third generation Americans, is not surprising, since, unlike many
white immigrants, Asians have not been as readily absorbed into Ameri-
can culture. While, as Eva Hoffman tells us, "traditionally, the fall from a
recognizable identity into oblivion has been one of emigration's greater
wounds," (90) it is this very loss of identity which has permitted the
immigrant to assimilate into the mainstream culture. The Asian immi-
grants, even without their women and families, have resisted assimila-
tion through their clan and tribal cohesiveness and their attachment to
their first language.4 This stubborn residual identity which refuses
oblivion characterizes much if not all of Asian-American writing today.
Even an avant-garde third-generation Chinese-American writer such as
David Henry Hwang works and re-works elements of his original cul-
ture with the contemporary American aesthetic.5
The case for an ethnopoetics underlying a reading of Asian-American
poetry is stronger than merely an argument for the recognition of some
easy exoticism in the work. There is plenty of that too, when the poets
fail to write on "what is really there" and begin to produce "ethnocentric
figments": a wearisome rummaging for figures of speech, images, and
RECONSTRUCTING ASIAN-AMERICAN POETRY 53
phrase-making which point towards an Asian identity; an embar

and almost idiotic abundance of jade, buddha figures, bound feet
ons and so on. The more imaginative come up with wontons, or
pomelos, and less familiar cultural artifacts to broaden their
specific literary world. The critical issue here is not whether the d
reflects an Asian-American experience but whether the sum of the
is greater than its parts - its diction, subject, rhythms, and dev
criterion which applies to all poems regardless of origin. These
images are like so much local color; they add charm to ordinary sub
make the familiar appear strange and complex, and offer the r
taste of the exotic in secure environments. But used as ornamen
do not justify reading the work as substantially different from
poems written in the mainstream.
It is paradoxically only when the ethnic references in a work bec
extra-local or when the force of that ethnocentred culture becomes a
creative localism that the critic is compelled to pay mind to the presence
of an underlying ethnopoetics. As Charles Olson, in a different context,
put it, localism then becomes the new history and through it the writer
rediscovers myth and rediscovers history (Symposium of the Whole, 62). As
in our reading of regional and national literatures, ethnicity raises not
only questions of identity but of inherent literary qualities which place
new demands on audience understanding. To answer even the most
basic questions on the text - what's happening? why is it happening?
what does it mean? - is to introduce conventionally non-literary mate-
rials, often materials more appropriately seen as sociological, anthropo-
logical, or political in nature.6
We can see an ethnopoetics functioning on at least three levels in
Asian-American poetry. The first is the level of surface features of style:
it includes the choice of diction, figures of speech, imagery, and turns of
phrases which are identifiably Asian-American in association or origin.
In Cathy Song's prize-winning first book of poems, Picture Bride, we find
the attempt to reach for the tastes, smells, sounds, and colors of Asian-
American experience expressing itself in images of Asian-American
particulars: "The children are the dumplings/. ... Wrap the children/ in
wonton skins, bright quilted bundles" (63). The danger in this stylistic
venture rises from an over-dependence on linguistic conventions; these
ethnic images appear as isolated devices unrelated to the poems' integral
unfolding. Jade, sour plums, mah-jongg, tofu, and Buddha begin to
attract too much self-conscious attention and to substitute for the poetic
explosions of meaning found elsewhere in her work.
The use of ethnic color, however, can lead to a plangent or poignant
blending of cultural associations, as in Garrett Kaoru Hongo's poem,
"The White Robe of Clouds," in which the realities of Californian life (the
pool, Billy Holliday music) are contrasted to Japanese spirits ("Shakalo ...
the day of the dead/when the spirits come back to us") whose departures
are more vivid to the poet than his American present (Bridgel6). By force
of allusion to symbols drawn from the original culture, the poet can
create a style of nostalgia which looks eastward, forsaking entirely the
American contemporary scene, as in Frances Chung's lyric: " a young
Chinese scholar writes/ was it by the goldfish pond . . . the garden of
peonies in your dress/ was it by the Pearl River" (Bridge 14).
The second level is linguistic, particularly in the incorporation of
phrases or whole lines of the original language into the English text.7
Ronald Tanaka's book, The Shino Suite: Sansei Poetry, Opus 2, for instance,
has many examples of such intrusions into a work that seems essentially
American in sensibility. As he tells us, "The everyday language of even
monolingual Sansei .. . like myself cannot be adequately represented
without some Japanese expressions, though it must be borne in mind
that this significance is grounded in a distinctly Japanese-American
'Lebensform"' (15).
The linguistic survival of first language expressions, whether actual or
translated into English, points to the poets' awareness that there exists in
the original language itself certain values, concepts, and cultural traits
which are not discoverable in English. In Janice Mirikitani's book, Awake
In the River, the dominant tone of social and feminist protest (more than
half the poems deal with political dissent, whether in terms of sexual
politics or of U.S. involvement in foreign intrigues) would appear to take
it very much into the mainstream of articulate, committed writing.
There is little of the stereotypes of passive, decorative, formal qualities
associated with Japanese women in her poems. But everything in the
book, even the movements of dissent, of liberation and of raw honesty,
are subordinated to the ethnic perspective. It is a perspective which is
clearly American-based but which does not lose sight of its Japanese
sources, its history in World War II Relocation camp suffering, and its
local strengths in family and community; and this ethnic perspective
surfaces most clearly in her attachment to meaning contained in Japa-
nese expressions.
Mirikitani's use of her first language is more than ornamental, for it
demonstrates the continued vitality of specifically ethnocentric mean-
ings. In "Crazy Alice," the repetition of two Japanese phrases, "akashi ne/
jinsei wa akashi," and their English translation, "life's so strange," with
the repetition of the lines, "before the war/ I had a name," are offered as a
talisman to the poem's significance: the cultural disassociations suffered
by Japanese women in America and the importance of the Second World
War as a historical act and myth in Japanese-American culture. The
refrain is a lament, not a protest. To express the Japanese female's
traditional attitudes of resignation woven with loss, Mirikitani repeat-
edly uses Japanese expressions. In this manner, she is able to d

herself from that ethos while simultaneously creating an empa
appreciation of it. We find the same technique applied in "Lul
where the poet's portrait of her submissive mother during the relo
experience to Tule Lake is just without being judgemental and c
without being ironic.
Similarly, in Joseph Bruchac's anthology of Asian-American p
Breaking Silence, we find many poets using vocabularies which
them to resist assimilation into the European-based mainstream
include words and phrases with the definitions discreetly enclosed
poems (e.g., "we call this momoiro, Japanese/ for peach color"
More often these first language intrusions are left undefined, p
pressure on the reader to pay attention to the cross-ethnic commu
tions.
The third level where an ethnopoetics is called for lies in the contextual
realm, what some theoreticians might call the area of intertextuality. It is
in this area that most readers have difficulty with an ethnic text.8 For
example, Richard Elman, reviewing John Yau's Corpse and Mirror for The
New York Times Book Review, tells us: "I've read and reread Mr. Yau's poems
... and am chagrined to have come away with so little I liked and so much
that was puzzling to me" (36). His patent bewilderment with the poems
leads to his rejection of the work: "In the end I decided Mr. Yau's
concerns were not my own, except accidently, and that this clever and
talented man was not interested in moving me to wonder at his words."
Clayton Eshleman writing for the Los Angeles Times, on the other hand,
finds Corpse and Mirror to be the strongest book to appear in the Holt and
Rinehart National Poets Series! The chief difference in the two review-
ers' approaches to explain their radically opposed evaluations appears
early in both reviews. To Elman, John Yau is an unanchored poet, unlike
Victor Hernandez Cruz whose Puerto Rican, "Spanglish" poems he
reviews favorably in the same article. But to Eshleman, Yau is a Chinese-
American; based on this ethnic identification, he is able to identify many
of the allusions, contextual patterns, and intertextual consignings that
the former reviewer missed altogether. Eshleman notes, "Yau draws on
images of ancient China, evoking a world of omens and memories, via
the atmosphere of a post-World War II Chinese background permeated
by the lack of any real American past. Here is a poetry in which Chinese
chariots must, in effect, make their way through the desolate landscape
of late night Hollywood movies" (8). In Eshleman's brief review, the
word "Chinese" appears eight times; in Elman's review, we are never
told, and perhaps he himself did not know, that Yau is a Chinese-Amer-
ican.
Being a Chinese-American does not in itself make one a better or more
interesting poet, but it does make one a different poet from a Native
American or Hispanic or Anglo-American poet. The differences in cul-
tural contexts create significant differences between readers' expecta-
tions and authors' intentions, between the untrained readers' conven-
tional, culture-bound responses and the trained readers' ethno-sensitive
interpretations. As Wolfgang Iser tells us, "The reader fills in the blank in
the text, thereby bringing in a referential field; the blank arising in turn
out of the referential field is filled in by way of the theme-and-
background structure; and the vacancy arising from juxtaposed themes
and backgrounds is occupied by the reader's standpoint, from which the
various reciprocal transformations lead to the emergence of the aesthetic
object... it is by this sequence that the meaning of the text comes alive in
the reader's imagination" (The Reader in the Text 119). When this sequence
is broken, a technique made meaningful through a referential field may
appear meaningless when it is not so privileged by cultural custom. The
jarring juxtaposition of low-class and trivial pub chatter in "The Waste-
land" with classical allusions is conventionally elevated as modernistic,
and profoundly suggestive of the commingling of the sacred and vulgar,
the disintegration of Western civilization, and so on. A similar technique,
juxtaposing ancient Chinese images and contemporary American cul-
tural graffitti, when the Chinese allusions are unreconstructed, can only
lead to uncomprehending rejection on Mr. Elman's part. The ethno-
graphic bent (which in its European manifestation is often elucidated and
much appreciated in "The Wasteland") must first be acknowledged in
Asian-American writing for full justice to be given to the literary merits
of the work.
To say this is not to deny that literary values take precedence in a
literary evaluation of a text, but it does bring to question the privileging
of certain ideological values in literary criticism as it is practiced today;
values which emphasize the European-based literary canon and debase
and ignore literary effects and criteria which are non-European. To take
a simple example, in European-based literature, psychological realism is
highly valued; social conflict and individual freedom are seen as twin
themes in which the individual subject's experiences and ecstasies (as
expressed in James Joyce's epiphanies, Maslow's self-actualizations,
Woolf's stream-of-consciousness, for instance) are the highest valued
creations of literature. Asian-American poetry frequently expresses a
counter-tradition which is Confucianist rather than Freudian, in which
the individual is seen as receiving value and dignity in relationship to
some worthy others: conflict submits to familial and community integ-
rity, and the discovery of social/radical/ethnic strengths is paramount,
not some easy cliche.9
Often the Asian-American poets' portrayals of fathers and mothers
are unsentimental, but they are never hateful; the subjective pen
tions into the object at hand which are so much a part of the modern
imagist/realist movement when seen at work on filial themes are alm
always infused with a reverence which is recognizably an aspect
ancestor worship. "Giving myself a break/ I step over to the doorjam
rub my back like my father/ and shout his, 'Cock-sacca!'/ at the a
ment./ He was a poet the way he drank" (43). James Masao M
expresses his connection to his father in a wry obscenity and, i
powerful juxtaposition, in the allusion to the drinking rituals of Chin
poets found in numerous classical Chinese verse. The allusion sign
the son's recognition of the value of his father's life and the continuit
this value in his own life as a poet. Lin Yutang, as a Chinese in Amer
1950, noted the protean, rootless, self-creative nature of Ameri
culture, "The Americans have some good ancestors; too bad they
have ancestor worship" (xiii). Reflected in Anglo-American literatu
the myth of the family as a destructive force to the subject's sovereig
The family is the arena for conflict where the individual is teste
from which he escapes unless he is destroyed. These themes perm
Western literature, from the dramas of Sophocles to Eugene O'N
plays. But in many non-Anglo groups, the family is a force for stren
and integrity, and the individual returns over and over again to
source for values, identity, consolation and re-integration.
The continued, repeated assertion of familial affections, reiteration
child/adult bonds, and use of family histories and anecdotal mat
parallel the increasing importance of memory as muse in contempora
American poetry (memory replacing invention when the tide of e
proves unsettling for the individual: arguably, memory becoming its
powerful invention when nothing much is certain any more). B
Asian-American poetry, generally, these family expression
grounded in social religion; they are pious, not sentimental, celebrati
A reader sensitive to the absorption of the individual into a fin
articulated kinship system and to the ways in which this social struc
is itself the source, conveyer, and end of devotional values will find in
bulk of Asian-American poetry some kind of reflection of ance
worship. Filial pieties, familial reverence, kin and friendship ci
communal identities are ties that make meaning of the poet's world a
form complex themes in Wing Tek Lum's poems or Garrett K
Hongo's volume, Yellow Light. They are given colloquial expressio
Alan Lau's collection, Songs for Jardina and a humorous turn in Eric C
Hawaiian talk-stories. And they become attenuated in Mei-mei Bur
brugge's poems or John Yau's Corpse and Mirror through incorpor
into the larger westernized culture.
The Confucianist context is itself one aspect of the larger eth
cultural context particular to each Asian group. For example, a Chinese-

American may experience as much difficulty as an Anglo-American in
understanding a Filipino-American poem. The particular nexus of Span-
ish and American colonial influences overlaid on a Tagalog, Pampango
or Iloko tribal mentality resulting in the combination of Christian mysti-
cism, native animism, and a strong democratic and Whitmanesque ethos
distinguish Filipino-American poetry from Japanese-American or Chinese-
American poems. The rhythms of the samba and the mambo enliven the
poems of Cyn. Zarco and Jessica Hagedorn, whose Hispanic-colored
background and tropical geography provide them with common cultural
affinities with Latinos from South America.
Lawson Fusao Inada's poem, "Chinks," (Asian-American Authors 111)
specifically treats the ethnic differences between Americans of Japanese
and those of Chinese descent. The poem's historical context is the period
of the Second World War when Japanese-Americans were detained in
relocation camps under suspicion of disloyalty to their country while
Chinese-Americans (often physically indistinguishable from the former
to Anglo-Americans) were held up as loyal patriots.
CHINKS
Ching Chong Chinaman
sitting on a fence
trying to make a dollar
chop-chop all day.
"Eju-kei-shung! Eju-kei shung!"

that's what they say.
When the War came,

they said, "We Chinese!"
When we went away,

they made sukiyaki,
saying, "Yellow all same."
When the war closed,

they stoned the Japs' homes.
Grandma would say:

"Marry a Mexican,
a Nigger, just don't
marry no Chinese."
The poem skillfully uses pidgin and American idiom to characteri

alien group, and while it makes the point of Chinese-American preju
and exploitation of the Japanese-American political oppression clear, the

"blank" in the text points to a larger social context of minorities s
against each other by a racist white society. The poem's full irony, it
economy of narrative expression and density of allusion rising from the
use of pidgin and certain cultural/racial associations will only come alive
when the ethnic history, its referential field, is known.
Ethnopoetics argues that a proper appreciation of any work must
include not only those critical skills which I.A. Richards delineated i
Practical Criticism but also a specific sensibility trained to understand an
appreciate the surface stylistic features of folkloristic and local effects;
linguistic knowledge of the original language of the poet necessary t
apprehend the author's intentions; and an informed socio-cultur
approach which counteracts the privileging of the dominant culture.
does not claim that ethnic writing has literary value in and of itself, but
does say that literary value cannot be approportioned, that is, meanin
cannot be assigned, until the unequal relationship between uninforme
reader and informed text be corrected. Ethnopoetics argues that literary
studies must turn not only from erudition to interpretation (as Jonatha
Culler claims) but also from interpretation to instruction.
Notes
1. Murray Krieger acknowledges that "experienced readers of literature, as critics,

come to each piece of literature armed with expectations and unspoken opera-
tional definitions gleaned from their earlier literary experiences, and these expec-
tations and definitions will shape what those readers see and how they judge
what they see. Such expectations and definitions serve, in effect, as the reader's
theoretical subtext. And a major task of theoretical scholarship has been to bring
such submerged elements of control to the surface . . ." (18).
2. Stanley Fish's call for "reading communities" and Derrida's statement that "the
reader reads the text," however, can and have been taken to assert the cultural
superiority of the majority; that is, to put forward a hegemony of literary values.
More pertinent to an ethnopoetics is Robert Crosman's argument that "Any
word or text... has meaning only when it is fitted into some larger context" (The
Reader in the Text, 151). Crosman puts forward the more universal concept that
readers make meaning and sees the process of reading as translating.
3. In the Winter 1983 issue of Bridge devoted to Asian-American writing, 15 out of 25
poems are ethnocentered. At the same time, as the editor points out, there is a
wider range of artistic approaches and subject matter represented in this collec-
tion than in past issues. The poems cover genres such as the lyric, the satire, the
documentary poem, cross-cultural odes, and "matrices," which the editor defines
as "an incipient form (employing) a wide range of rapidly juxtaposed languages,
media, historical frameworks, motifs, and rhetorical moods" (11). Also, please
note that all Asian-American poems and volumes cited in the text will appear in
the Bibliography of Asian-American Poetry which accompanies the article.
4. See, for example, Maxine Hong Kingston's treatment of both female and male
Chinese immigrants to the United States in Woman Warrior and Chinaman, Louis
Chu's fictional creation of sojourner experiences in Eat a Bowl of Tea, and Betty Lee
Sung's flattering popular sociology, Mountain of Gold. For a more intensive study of
the Asian in the United States, see Rose Hum Lee's The Chinese in the United States
and Stanford M. Lyman's The Asian in North America.
5. As a New York Times review (Oct. 30, 1983) points out, "All of Mr. Hwang's work
including 'F.O.B.,''The Dance and the Railroad,' and 'Family Devotions,' . .
attempts to combine Asian myths and theater styles with contemporary Ameri-
can characters and realities" (6).
6. For example, a knowledge of these materials, of the writers' universe of discourse,
is crucial for a critic to decide whether a work is overdetermined or indeterminate
and how it is so. What may appear indeterminate may be only the result of the
reader's absence of references rather than the actual absence of references in the
text. With many Asian-American texts, the reader is often conscious of his
distance from the materials. Too much distance and the text loses its significance.
Often also the reader is made conscious of the author's earnest and well-
intentioned aim to recover these materials.
7. A body of Asian-American writing in the first language does exist, the chief
example of which is those poems composed by Chinese immigrants on Angel
Island. All the poems (more than 135) are written in the classical style, and, as
rendered in translation by Hin Mark Lai and Genny Lim, they are replete with
allusions to Chinese literature, folkloristic images, mythic figures and Buddhist
and Confucianist references.
8. In contrast to most modern poetry, the poetry in Asian-American writing is
located in its subjects. Modern American poetry takes its aesthetic values from
T.S. Eliot's theory of the impersonality of poetry, while many Asian-American
poets localize value in family and immigrant narrative and in ethno-specific social,
political and highly personal themes. These themes rouse varying attitudes
ranging from reverence, nostalgia, satire, humour, anger to historical urgency.
9. As C.P. Fitzgerald notes, Confucianism bears the traces of a complex social
system which attempts to harmonize conflicting tendencies: "It is difficult to
escape the feeling that Confucian doctrine is based on a shrewd appreciation of
the real character of the Chinese people, and endeavours to stimulate by precept
and regulation the qualities which are not naturally well developed in the national
character.... The Confucian insistence on filial duty and the strict training of the
young would seem harsh until it is realized that the Chinese, a people naturally
over-kind and indulgent to children, are also averse to discipline.... The detached
indifference with which the Chinese are prone to regard the affairs of the world
beyond the family circle must be corrected by a firm insistence on the value of
benevolence, submission to authority, and loyal service to the prince" (88).
Works Cited
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Elman, Richard. "Three American Poets," The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 18, VII,
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Eshleman, Clayton. "A Poetry of Omens and Memories," Los Angeles Times, Au
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Fitzgerald, C.P. China: A Short Cultural History. New York: Praeger, 1973.
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Hoffman, Eva. "From Poland, a New Breed of Emigre," The New York Times Magazi
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Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett,
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Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics

Author(s): Shirley Lim

ethnopoetics to approach certain bodies of writing is not separate from

phrase-making which point towards an Asian identity; an embar

edly uses Japanese expressions. In this manner, she is able to d

Being a Chinese-American does not in itself make one a better or more

cultural context particular to each Asian group. For example, a Chinese-

"Eju-kei-shung! Eju-kei shung!"

When the War came,

When we went away,

When the war closed,

Grandma would say:

The poem skillfully uses pidgin and American idiom to characteri

and exploitation of the Japanese-American political oppression clear, the

1. Murray Krieger acknowledges that "experienced readers of literature, as critics,

Haslam, Gerald W. Forgotten Pages of American Literature. Boston: Houghton Miff

Bibliography of Asian-American Poetry

Adachi, Jeffrey. D. Yancha. 1981.

Bamboo Ridge. Hawaii Writers Quarterly: Hawaii.

Chia, Cheng Suit. Turned Clay. Fiddlehead P, 1982.

Between Lives. Unpublished mss.

Lim, Genny. Published and unpublished poems.

Ling, Amy. Chinamerican Reflections. Lewiston: Great Raven P, 1984.

Mirikitani, Janice. Awake In the River. San Francisco: Isthmus P, 1978.

Villa, Jose Garcia. Seven Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Wake, 1948.

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