Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry

Chapter 49 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry Jul ia na S pa hr “What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecological degradations, shifts and upheavals in identiications of gender and labor? . . . What are the implications of writing at this moment, in precisely this ‘America’?”1 These questions are asked by Myung Mi Kim, a poet of the disquieting linguistic disorientation brought on by immigration, in her book Commons. They are questions that haunt much contemporary U.S. poetry. And many of the poets who have taken these questions and embraced them in the late twentieth and early twenty-irst century have written a poetry in English that includes other languages and/or is written mainly in the pidgins and creoles that resulted from English-language colonialism. I use the unwieldy phrase “literature in English that includes other languages” because I am not in this chapter talking about the U.S. literature written in other languages that Werner Sollors and Marc Shell have collected.2 What I am talking about is poetry written in English for English-speaking readers who may or may not have l uency in the languages of the poem. I am talking about the “bilingual,” also known as the “multilingual,” and also known as the “intralingual” traditions that so deine the literature of the U.S.Mexico border, such as that written by Juan Felipe Herrera and Alurista. And I am also at the same time talking about a poet such as Kim, who brings into her work, as do many writers associated with multiculturalism and/or identity poetries, her heritage language (a language that is not the speaker’s dominant language but that is learned because of a cultural connection) of Korean, and about Craig Santos Perez, who includes Chamorro, and about Anne Tardos, who includes Hungarian, German, and French. And I am also talking about writers who include through appropriation and quotation languages that are unrelated to them in terms of heritage or location, or perhaps even luency, such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who includes not only Spanish but also Nahuatl, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who includes Greek and French. Like Doris Sommer and many other scholars of the bi-, the multi-, and the inter-, 1123 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr I am interested in how this work is often full of “invitations to engage, to delay and possibly redirect our hermeneutical impulse to cross barriers and fuse horizons.”3 But at the same time, I argue against the idea that poetry is best served by seeing the sociocultural speciicity of these various poetries as constitutive diferences. And I refuse to deine this literature in English as marginal. It is, I argue, central to U.S. poetry. If we categorize the use of polyglot elements in poetry as a similarity (rather than assuming that poetry’s distinctive sociocultural traditions are constitutive diferences), it is easy to recognize a long and broad history of literature in English that includes other languages. For the signiicant number of U.S. poets who use languages other than English in their work, whether their motives are a form of realism or a pointed resistance to globalizing English varies from poet to poet. But these writers are inevitably writing out of an awareness of the changing role of English as it becomes a global language. By the 1990s, English was the dominant or oicial language in more than sixty countries and is represented on every continent and on three major oceans. Because of English’s ties with colonialism and globalization, as Alastair Pennycock writes, it poses a direct threat to the very existence of other languages. More generally, however, it poses the less dramatic but far more widespread danger of what we might call linguistic curtailment. When English becomes the irst choice as a second language, when it is the language in which so much is written and in which so much of the visual media occur, it is constantly pushing other languages out of the way, curtailing their usage in both qualitative and quantitative terms.4 And yet, at the same time, it is wrong to represent English as monolithic or simplistically dominant. Even within the United States, where English has an unchallenged dominance, and where the consistent underfunding of language-acquisition programs in schools makes this unlikely to change anytime soon, the story is complicated. Around 162 languages are now spoken in the United States. The U.S. government does not have an “oicial” language. And in some parts of the United States, English’s dominance is maintained by institutional iat, such as in Hawai‘i, where if it were not for the insistence of the Department of Education, Pidgin might dominate. (“Pidgin” is the word commonly used for what linguists call Hawai‘i Creole English, a language that was created by linguistically separated plantation workers in Hawai‘i so they could communicate with one another; it includes vocabulary and syntaxes from English, Korean, Hawaiian, Chinese, and a few other languages.) Similar 1124 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry to how globalization provokes localism, the growth in English and the economic rise of the United States meant that in the 1990s, as more and more words were spoken in English in places new to English, more and more words that were not a part of English were being spoken within the United States. The number of U.S. residents who declare that they speak a language other than English at home has increased dramatically, from 32 million in 1990 to 47 million in 2000. As an example of how these two oppositional yet related tendencies – the expansion of English globally and the expansion of languages other than English within the United States – shape U.S. poetry, I want to start by discussing two oddly similar works written in English that include Narragansett: James Thomas Stevens’s Tokinish (1994) and Rosmarie Waldrop’s A Key into the Language of America (1994). These two works – both written in English but pointedly including the indigenous language Narragansett, both suggesting that the lyric’s intimacy is inlected and even enriched by global histories – function like indicator species in that they deine something distinctive about the ecosystem of contemporary poetry and also announce a mutation in the part of this ecosystem in which “multilingual” or “macaronic” forms turn from an almost relentless exploration of a heritage language to a questioning investigation of what it means to be a writer in English when English is a global and imperial language. Both books were published in the early 1990s; both poets have lived in Providence, Rhode Island; and both poets are aligned with the lyric’s more innovative moments. That two writers of such disparate cultural identities – Stevens is a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation; Waldrop is a German immigrant – wrote such similar books should be read not as a lack of imagination but rather as one of the interesting ways poetry takes up questions and investigates them in dialogue. (Although Stevens and Waldrop know each other, each claims not to have known that the other was working with Narragansett material.) Both poets take their Narragansett from Roger Williams’s 1643 book A Key into the Language of America, a work that is very much a sort of primer on how to negotiate the beginnings of the globalization of the continent that is now America, a book very much aware that English is not the “natural” language of the continent.5 Stevens’s Tokinish is a series of page-long sections spread out over forty-two pages. It begins with four epigraphs: two quotes from John Donne and two deinitions of Narragansett words quoted from Williams. In the irst set of paired epigraphs, Stevens contrasts a translation of the Narragansett tokinish – “wake him” – with a passage about sleep from Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In the second, he juxtaposes 1125 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr Donne – “But yet the body is his booke” (from “The Extasie”) – with two more translations: Awaunkeesitteoúwincohòck? Wússuckwheke. Who made you? The book6 These epigraphs obviously literalize the doubled view that is Tokinish’s concern. And they also point to how this is a work that is, despite its lyric interiority, somewhat about globalization. Donne’s Devotions was written at the beginning of this current wave of colonial expansion. Among other things, it is a work about connection, about the idea that no man is an island. This is the global Donne, poet of empire, advocate of connective intimacy. This is the Donne who, in “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” calls his beloved “my America, my new found land.”7 Although it might be easy to argue that beside the global Donne Stevens places the local Narragansett, I think it is otherwise, as he takes his Narragansett from Williams’s Key, a work that should be required reading in any globalization studies class. Williams is, like Donne, constitutive of seventeenth-century globalization. Along with some nine thousand others, he immigrated to Boston in 1631. He was expelled from Massachusetts in 1635 for nonconformism. He bought land from the Narragansett and established Providence Plantation in what is now called Rhode Island. He was an outspoken advocate of Native American rights (as the Rhode Island tourist bureau likes to remind visitors), and yet in 1672 he also sold a number of Native Americans into involuntary servitude (a fact overlooked by that same Rhode Island tourist bureau). And his A Key into the Language of America is both a unique work and a product of its time. For its contemporary readers, it served as a how-to manual for contact and trade. And for many years it was considered a key anthropological work, providing an unusually detailed record of Narragansett culture in the mid-seventeenth century. The book has played a crucial role even among the Narragansett. Although there is some debate about the continued use of the language among those who identify as Narragansett (some say the Narragansett language has been extinct since 1810), Narragansett Dawn, a journal started in the 1930s, has a lesson in Narragansett in each issue that draws extensively from Williams. The editor, Princess Red Wing, argues that she includes the lessons “because it is generally believed that nothing remains of the Narragansett tongue.”8 Stevens frequently engages with colonialism, with indigenousness, and with queerness in his poetry. So the complicated uses of Williams’s Key would not have been lost on him. But unlike Williams, he is not writing something with a dictionary’s desire for l uency or an immigrant’s desire for cataloguing explanation. And although Narragansett is not a heritage language for him, 1126 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry his interest in Narragansett culture is not entirely arbitrary; in 1992 Stevens worked as a data collector at the Narragansett Community House, working with inner-city children on a program called Whateanuonk that was designed to counter Providence gang and drug culture. Stevens, though, is, like Donne, writing a lyric poem. And one productive way to read the English that is interrupted by Narragansett in Tokinish is as suggestively reiguring lyric intimacy as necessarily always in dialogue with global exchanges. Édouard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation, says that a decolonized Caliban might reply to Prospero “through the individual ardor of lyricism and the collective practice of politics.”9 While there is no suggestion of the Narragansett being decolonized anytime soon in this poem, there is no better way of describing the negotiations between the individual and the collective that motivate a work such as Tokinish. The bulk of the poem uses lyric’s possible metaphors of contact – both cultural and sexual – to discuss how often-conlicting frames and traditions meet. Even the most intimate of moments, Tokinish suggests, are riddled with global histories. Sexuality is igured as contiguous with other relations. “To walk the periphery of islands,” reads the irst line, “as if knowing the border of body” (CSH, p. 107). In this poem, the genders of both lover and beloved are indeterminate, and while the beloved is marked as white, the lover is not directly marked. Stevens uses the age-old Petrarchan tradition of listing the beloved’s body parts, but none of them are gender speciic. At only one point is there an indication that the beloved might be male: “In him I have found a House, a Bed, / A Table, Company . . .” (CSH, p. 140). The contiguity and ambiguity Stevens enacts works to trouble Donne’s language of desire and, by extension, the tropes of European imperialism and its accompanying racial and sexual categorical tendencies. Tokinish critiques Donne’s erotics not directly but by dismantling the Petrarchan tradition – by, for instance, dividing its body parts into a multilingual duality: Néepuck. Wunnícheke. Wunnáks. Mapànnog. Apòme. Sítchipuck. Wuttòne. Wuskeésuckquash. Mscáttuck. The blood. The hand. The bellie. The breast. The thigh. The necke. The mouth. The eyes. The fore-head. (CSH, p. 142) This list is not in Williams’s Key. Stevens has instead cobbled it together from various parts of the Key to create an erotic subtext, an exploration of desire’s separated conjunctions, multiplicities, and variable points of view. 1127 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr On the surface, Waldrop’s A Key into the Language of America is structured very much like Williams’s A Key into the Language of America (and less like Stevens’s Tokinish). She collages a great deal of text from Williams. Yet Waldrop is, as Susan Vanderborg notes, an unreliable and tricky collager; she will do things like substitute “white men” for Williams’s “Englishman.” Still, in her Key, Waldrop uses Williams’s chapter titles, beginning with “Salutations” and ending with “Of Death and Buriall.” Each chapter is divided into four sections, a form that is indebted to Williams, although Waldrop adapts it to her own ends. The chapters begin with lyrical prose blocks that are mainly about Narragansett traditions and tend to contain most of the collaged language from Williams. The irst section of the irst chapter begins with words from Williams (in bold) and immediately alludes to the frame of language, to the inclusion of two languages with very diferent histories. The title, or word printed as a title, is “Salutations”; the following text begins “Are of two sorts and come immediately before the body. The pronunciation varies according to the point where the tongue makes contact with pumice found in great quantity.”10 After the prose block comes a loose, associational list of words. In most chapters, these words are in English, but in this irst chapter Waldrop starts of with Narragansett: Asco Wequassunnúmmis. Good morrow. sing salubrious imitation intimate (KLA, p. 3) The lists are followed by irst-person monologues. The one in the irst chapter begins: “I was born in a town on the other side which didn’t want me in so many” (KLA, p. 4). Throughout the book, these sections involve an unspeciied narrational “I.” Finally, each chapter ends with a passage that most closely adheres to the conventions of a free verse poem (with its ragged right margin and lines halfway across the page), but these poems are not syntactically conventional. The irst chapter’s reads: the Courteous Pagan barefoot and yes his name laid down as dead one openness one woman door so slow in otherwise so close (KLA, p. 4) 1128 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry As with the word lists, these poems are associational and ofer themselves to varied and unconventional readings. Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935 and moved to the United States after World War II “as a white, educated European who did not ind it diicult to get jobs, an advanced degree, a university position” (KLA, p. xix). Her introduction to Key begins with the story of her arrival from Germany, how she came “expecting strangeness, expecting to be disorientated” but experienced little culture shock – except for the Narragansett place names (KLA, p. xiii). It was these that brought her to Williams’s Key. Waldrop’s work is frequently lyrical, quietly elliptical, and full of collaged language, and the tendency has been to read her work as feminist and/or experimental, as loosely associated with Language poetry. Although Waldrop’s work is important to these discussions, what is distinctive about A Key into the Language of America is the way it remains both an immigrant and an experimental work and yet also addresses continuing colonialism within the United States and immigrant complicity with that colonialism. Her Key interests me because, rather than relying, as many North American “experimental” works do, on modernist forms such as repetition or fragmentation or parataxis to disrupt the conventional syntaxes of English, she includes an indigenous and local language. It would be easy to say something dismissive here about Waldrop as yet another Native American–obsessed German. It would also be easy to continue to insist that Waldrop’s work is immigrant and/or experimental and avoid noticing the linguistic recognitions within her work, to take them as only incidental not constitutive. And it is not that Waldrop completely avoids some of the endless diiculties of cross-cultural contact. Waldrop’s Key only touches on the political and economic issues that are more directly engaged by explicitly anticolonial poets who see poetry as having a part to play in struggles to regain land or cultural uplift. And yet she does not take Native American knowledge and present herself as a guide for a mainly Anglo audience. She doesn’t present a nostalgic view of the Native past as a time of innocence before a current fall from grace. And her work is not a tale of ethnopoetic mastery. It is crucial here instead to notice that Waldrop’s turn to Narragansett is through Williams. Her narrative is, like his, rooted in the shared history of contact, of globalization. And her Key is an attempt to recover place names rather than true, pure cultures. Both Stevens and Waldrop in their works dwell with the peculiar and contradictory relationship that writers have to their medium of language. These are works that explore how languages have geographies and how they can 1129 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr layer on top of one another; how one can be invasive and another can be at risk or disappear as a result; how they can feel personal and intimate and yet are clearly cultural, created by groups of individuals over time, requiring consensus; how they are full of political uses and valences, often carrying nationalisms; and how they are somewhat permeable for those who want to do the work and learn them. This emerging formation of a poetry in English that includes other languages includes not only Stevens and Waldrop but also Kim. The title of Dura, her third book, is one of the more resonant examples of this.11 “Dura” can be the dense, tough, outermost membranous envelope of the brain and spinal cord, literally “hard mother” in the Arabic, al-‘umm al-jalīda or al-jāiya. It can be derived from durare, “to last, endure” in Italian; durer, “to last, to run, to go on” in French; or durar, “to last” or, in its feminine form, “hard, stale, tough, stif,” in Spanish. It can be “a door” in Faroese; it can be “to spit” in Filipino; it can be “to build” in Romanian; it can be the name of an ancient city in Syria; it can be the Romanized transcription of the phrase “listen up” in Korean; it can be the name of the group of people who in live in the hills of Dura Danda, Turlungkot, Kunchha Am Danda of Lamjung District, and some adjacent villages of Tanahun District in Nepal; it can be the language of the Dura; it can be duras, a variety of sorghum in southern Asia and northern Africa; and so on . . . Whether or not (and my guess is not) Kim intended all of these meanings, the word is interestingly meaningful in a variety of languages. Furthermore, throughout her work, rather than suggesting that Korean (Kim was born in Seoul and came to the United States when she was nine) or English is constitutive of any sort of identity, Kim returns again and again to question the naturalness of English. Language lessons and bureaucratic questions about language repeatedly show up in her work. In Under Flag, for instance, she asks, “Can you read and write English? Yes _____. No _____.”12 In The Bounty, the poem “Primer” announces, “This is the study book” as an epigraph and charts comparisons between Korean and English: mostly translations of the Scriptures into Chinese which educated Koreans could read inculcate its shame to learn the English of a Midwest town13 In “Thirty and Five Books” in Dura she writes: “9.8 One of the irst words understood in English: stupid.”14 Also in Dura, “Cosmography” includes a section that looks like the short answer part of a language quiz; the deinitions 1130 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry are in English and the answers that ill in the blank are in Hangul (the script used for Korean). “Hummingbird” also begins with what looks like a quiz: a somewhat diicult and impossible-to-imagine quiz, but still one that begins with the request for a name. I will briely continue listing works in English that include other languages just to give a hint of the linguistic and geographic diversity of what I am talking about, for among these writers are not only Stevens, Waldrop, and Kim, but also Joe Balaz, a poet whose work uses many diferent forms – from performance poetry to lyric poetry to spoken word poetry to rap and to wordplay – for anticolonial intent. In Ola he writes a series of teasing visual poems that pun in Hawaiian and English at the same time.15 The poem “‘Elua Pololia” shows two jellyish (or ‘elua pololia), one labeled “maoli” (or “native”) and the other “haole” (or “white person”). They are linked by tentacles that spell out “hapa” (or “mixed blood”). And one cannot read this poem without moving between languages. However, his poems are not like those optical illusions in which one looks at the black space and sees two faces, and one looks at the white space and sees a vase, but one can never see both at the same time. Rather, one must be open to seeing both the Hawaiian and the English meanings unmixed yet side by side for the poem to make any sense. Francisco X. Alarcón, in Snake Poems (1992) – in a move that is eerily similarly to that of Stevens and Waldrop – writes a personal, lyric history in dialogue with a seventeenth-century colonial text: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que oy viven entre los indios naturales desta Nueva España (Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customes That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain).16 Ruiz de Alarcón wrote his treatise as a denunciation of Native religious and medical beliefs and in the process transcribed a number of spells and invocations in Nahuatl. The introduction and the back cover present Alarcón’s decision to use Ruiz de Alarcón’s treatise as a personal one (the back cover states that Alarcón was “intrigued by the manuscript and by the disquieting possibility that Ruiz de Alarcón might be a distant relation”), and the poems are short, quiet lyrics, often elliptical in their personal reference. The poems are in English and include both Spanish and Nahuatl. The poem “Songs,” for instance, reads in its entirety, “xochitl / lower / lor.”17 What seems telling about Snake Poems is that it is yet another example of a contemporary U.S. poet who makes a pointed gesture to include an indigenous language in a book written in English and who does so, very similarly to Waldrop, in order to place himself as part of a global history, perhaps a history that is less than heroic. 1131 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr Mark Nowak’s Revenants (2000) is an exploration of the Polish American communities of his childhood around Bufalo, New York. In a reversal of universalism’s tendency to speak the dominant language, Nowak uses Polish as a point of complicated speciicity to explore what are often abstract concepts. The poems are built around concepts such as zwyczaj (custom), zakorzenić się (get roots in, take root), rozum (reason, wisdom), and Grzech Pierworodny (original sin). The poem “Zwyczaj” literalizes this by having the Polish interrupt a quote from a scholarly article in the book Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes: “With immersion the ield researcher sees from inside how people lead their lives [zakorzenić się] how they carry out their daily rounds of activities [zakorzenić się] what they ind meaningful [zakorzenić się] and how they do . . . ”18 As might be obvious, I am performatively grouping together writers that might not be recognized as having anything to do with one another. I want to suggest that these writers – and I have discussed merely six here of a long possible list – might be part of not minority traditions but rather a signiicant political-aesthetic formation of U.S. literature, if considered together as the emergence of a literature in English that includes other languages. It would be easy to place these somewhat messy, big, book-length projects in the tradition of modernism. But to consider them only as modernist risks overlooking the complicated relation of this poetry to U.S. identity categories and to speciic sociopolitical histories. This literature in English that includes other languages that I am talking about here is under the inl uence of the hothouse of the poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s that is associated with minority cultural activist movements. Many of these movements see poetry as one genre among many that can be used for cultural representation, cultural uplift, and preservation of the culturally disenfranchised. The creation of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in 1965 by Amiri Baraka is often seen as a foundational moment here. But that is just one moment among many. Bamboo Ridge, a workshop and press that publishes mainly literature written by Asian Americans in Hawai‘i and that has preserved and cultivated a 1132 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry literature in Pidgin, was founded in 1978. Arte Público, with its claim to “providing a national forum for Hispanic literature,” was founded in 1979.19 But this hothouse is not just limited to small arts institutions. Cultural movements in the 1970s often saw poetry as a part of their activism. The Hawaiian Renaissance, the Native American movement, the Chicano/a movement, and the various activisms around feminist and queer issues – all consider poetry as one possible genre in which to propose, examine, and cultivate cultural change. Hawaiian sovereignty activist and poet Haunani-Kay Trask, for instance, succinctly explains that poetry is one arena in which she explores Hawaiian struggles to regain land, when she writes of poetry as “both decolonization and re-creation. It is creativity in the Hawaiian grain and, therefore, against the American grain. Part of an encompassing Hawaiian cultural expression, my writing is exposé and celebration at one and the same time; it is a furious, but nurturing aloha for Hawai‘i.”20 This interest in poetry as a possible arena for change by cultural activist movements, combined with a lack of interest in publishing poetry on the part of increasingly proit-driven multinational publishing conglomerates, dramatically changes the social formations around poetry and the institutions that preserved and promoted it in the United States in the last half of the twentieth century. The members of these cultural activist movements develop community-based patronage systems in which they create distribution networks for poetry such as publishing houses, journals, anthologies, and reading series that support themselves and others in the group. At the beginning, these activist poetries were often written in English only or English mainly. (There are, of course, exceptions, such as the work of Alurista.) But eventually many came to see language usage as part of their cultural politics. This is not surprising, because, as Walter Mignolo notes, numerous language-preservation movements came to activist prominence in the last third of the century, along with a “clear and forceful articulation of a politics and philosophy of language that supplants the (al)location to which minor languages had been attributed by the philosophy of language underlying the civilizing mission and the politics of language enacted by the state both within the nation and the colonies.”21 English-language activist poetries began to develop a series of somewhat distinctive – even as there are formal areas of overlap – language practices in which the language other than English that is included in the work is the author’s heritage language. Gloria Anzaldúa sums up this position in 1987 in Borderlands: “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language.”22 Hawai‘i Pidgin writer Darrell H. Y. Lum notes similarly: “The persistence of Pidgin in the islands . . . suggests that it is less 1133 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr a matter of Pidgin speakers being unable to speak standard English but their choosing it as a symbol of local identity.”23 As a result of its colonial occupation by the United States and the migration patterns that fed its plantation system during the sugar boom, Hawai‘i has extraordinarily complex linguistic, political, and cultural situations. It is a place of many languages and many arguments about languages. Three languages – English, Pidgin, and Hawaiian – have their own, often warring but just as often amicable, literary traditions. Writers of Hawai‘i thus make decisions about whether to write in any or all or some of three languages, one with a precontact history, one colonially imposed, and one a mixture of many languages that comes out of the labor history of the plantation system. As long as there has been the Hawaiian language, there has been a literature composed (and later written) in Hawaiian. But the development of what one might call, perhaps problematically to some, Hawaiian American literature – or literature written by those who identify as Hawaiian but write mainly in English using the formal conventions of a U.S. poetry of identity (free verse, approximate lineation that goes two-thirds of the way across the page, a irst-person point of view, etc.) – did not really develop until about 1980. Much of this literature is provocatively anticolonial, calling for Hawaiian sovereignty. When this literature began, it featured work that was mainly in English with at most a sprinkling of Hawaiian words. By the end of the century, however, a very diferent picture of Hawaiian literature developed. And a glance at anthologies from the 1980s such as Seaweeds and Constructions: Anthology Hawaii (1979), Mālama: Hawaiian Land and Water (1985), and Ho‘omānoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (1989) next to the Native Hawaiian journal ‘Ōiwi (which began publication in 1999) shows an intensiication in the use of Hawaiian language within the literature. While the earlier anthologies feature work that is mainly in English with the occasional Hawaiian word often marked as “foreign” by italics, in ‘Ōiwi English-only poems are the rare exception. At the same time that Hawaiian literature turned more and more to the Hawaiian language, there was a parallel move in the literature in Pidgin written by Asian Americans in Hawai‘i. The irst literary book in Pidgin might be 1972’s Chalookyu Eensai by Bradajo ( Jozuf Hadley), but literature in Pidgin did not really gather much momentum until closer to the end of the century.24 At the beginning, if Pidgin showed up, it showed up as accent or local color in works with a standard English omniscient voice. For instance, the irst issue of Bamboo Ridge, the journal and press that has done the most to argue for Pidgin as an important literary language, has only one work that obviously includes Pidgin (Philip K. Ige’s “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” a short story 1134 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry with a Pidgin voice embedded in a standard English omniscient narrative).25 And although 1978’s Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers is often mentioned as the beginning of the local and Pidgin literary renaissance, most of the Pidgin in this anthology, and there is not a whole lot of it, is also embedded in a standard English narrative frame.26 But in the 1990s, Bamboo Ridge Press published a number of books in which Pidgin is a compositional language for entire poems, and sometimes even for the entire book, such as Eric Chock’s Last Days Here and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre.27 And a quick look through back issues of the journal Bamboo Ridge shows more and more work in Pidgin (and in Hawaiian, although less so, and this has been a constant point of contention) as time goes by. Because the literary scene in Hawai‘i is vibrant, community supported, and fairly isolated, one would expect a lot of cross talk and coalition building among its various poets, no matter their identity ailiation. But there is remarkably little overlap between the writers published in ‘Ōiwi and those published in Bamboo Ridge. Rodney Morales portrays “a contentious community, a community divided by degree of familiarity with place; a community as divided as it is united by ethnicity, gender, and race, a community that has historically privileged the colonizer spirit.”28 Among the distinct and thoughtful diferences are ones as to whether Pidgin can be a language of resistance or whether it is limited to being a language of accommodation; whether the category of “local” is colonial or neocolonial or possibly resistant; whether Pidgin literature, as exempliied by Bamboo Ridge, erases Native Hawaiian concerns and questions of sovereignty with its attention to “local identity” and its lyric poems that celebrate local childhood; and about who “owns” Pidgin. The conl icts between Pidgin and Hawaiian literature (and also, although I have not discussed it much here, the English-only literature written in Hawai‘i) are a sort of microexample of what Charles Bernstein is talking about when he calls his book A Poetics (“a,” as in one among many) and writes in it that “the state of American poetry can be characterized by the sharp ideological disagreements that lacerate our communal ield of action.”29 Although there is still a claim to dominance for lyric free verse in standard English made by both higher education and many of poetry’s institutions, such as the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Foundation, the genre of poetry as it is practiced in the whole of U.S. culture is deined by a series of “schools” or linguistic practices, in which it is presumed that these various poetries have more in common with the various communities that support them than with one another. For both scholars and writers themselves, when they consider the literature of the late twentieth century, it 1135 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr has made more sense to talk about Chicano/a literature and the connections between a poet like Alarcón and other Chicano/a writers such as Anzaldúa than it does to talk about Alarcón with Stevens and Waldrop under the frame of “American poetry.” No major anthology has yet grouped all of these writers together. (The only place in which I think such connections are recognized and explored are within the pages of Nowak’s journal XCP.) And it would be unusual for their work to appear together in the sort of course called “U.S. poetry.” The tendency is to keep the identity categories separate, to read Stevens as exemplary of Native American literature, Waldrop as experimental (presuming that “experimental” is mainly white Euro-American), Kim as Asian American, Balaz as Paciic Islander, and Alarcón as Chicano. And in the process, scholars tend to present these literatures as marginal or counter to not only some imagined dominant U.S. tradition but also one another. This is not only true of how literature functions in the academy – which it did in the late twentieth century through a series of ethnic/racial formations such as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Chicano/a literature – but it is also true of how poets group themselves. As Steve Evans notes, Anyone acquainted with contemporary American poetry, for example, is aware that certain basic positions organize the ield, that these draw in their wake speciic kinds of position-takings, and that what constitutes a viable possibility from the standpoint of one position may well be strictly ruled out with respect to another. If Bob Perelman and Maya Angelou switched curricula vitae and a month’s worth of reading engagements, publication venues, and institutional functions, no one would not notice.30 Both Bernstein’s “ideological disagreements” and Evans’s “positiontakings” are observations that are very much local and very much of the moment. But what they notice in the moment is very much related to what Pascale Casanova notices in her more historically and geographically wideranging The World Republic of Letters. In this work she charts out with impressive international scope how various national literatures attempt to gather resources through the “inescapably political instrument” of language.31 And as she points out, one of the stories that is often told about poetry again and again is of poets freeing their work from ossiied national traditions by either using a vernacular or misusing the national language. This story can be told with many examples. It is the story of Dante, and the story of the English Romantics, and the story, as Casanova tells with great detail, of the EuroAmerican modernists. And then the story that comes after is usually one in 1136 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry which these literatures, written in resistance, become the new national tradition. It is, as she notes, this very constant process of resistance and recuperation that deines the written word as literature: Literature is invented through a gradual separation from political obligations: forced at irst to place their art in the service of the national purposes of the state, writers little by little achieved artistic freedom through the invention of speciically literary languages. The uniqueness and originality of individual writers became apparent, indeed possible, only as a result of a very long process of gathering and concentrating literary resources.32 Casanova ends her study with a claim that she has wanted to write “a sort of critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world.”33 And although it would be easy to dismiss this as naïve, the claim embedded here – that literature criticism upholds or dismisses certain literary formations while pretending to be neutral – is worth remembering. The tendency to particularize the various literatures that ferment in the various hothouses of identity politics (Casanova’s “periphery of the literary world”) is almost a cliché at this point. Long dismissed by detractors for being overly speciic, particular, and self-involved, even defenders of this type of literature tend to argue using an assumption of its marginality and to place it in resistance to that imagined dominant national literary formation that had itself also collapsed by the end of the twentieth century. Mark McGurl, for instance, in his book about U.S. literary institutions, does not spend much time on the heyday of cultural activist movement literature that I have just described. But he does discuss it when it enters the academy. And what he describes are literatures of institutional individualisms. In his discussion of Chicano/a literature, for instance, McGurl ends up suggesting that Chicano/a literature might have been created for “the increasingly paramount value of cultural diversity in U.S. educational institutions” and might be yet another example of something that is more “a new way of accumulating symbolic capital in the fervently globalizing U.S. academy, pointing scholars toward valuable bodies of expertise they might claim as their own and ofering a rationale for the inclusion of certain creative writers in an emergent canon of world literature.”34 Whether one buys Auden’s line that “poetry makes nothing happen” or Vladimir Mayakovsky’s that one must “smash to smithereens the myth of an apolitical art,” it is worth noting that there is a moment when literary cultures in the United States decentralize, and as they do, they refuse the more universalist content of American literary nationalism and align themselves with 1137 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr various speciic forms of resistant activism.35 While McGurl is using Chicano/a literature as exemplary of institutional individualisms, it is worth remembering that this was not always so. One of the foundational poems of Chicano/a literature is “Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín” by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. It was originally published with Spanish (translated by Juanita Domínquez) and English versions in parallel columns. “Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín” could be read as a literal statement of individualism, with its “I am . . .” refrain, but it is also written, as Rafael Pérez-Torres notes, as “an organizing tool”: it was “written in 1967 for the Crusade for Justice, distributed by mimeographed copy, recited at rallies and strikes.”36 It is also a poem that uses the singular and heroic identity of its subject, “Joaquín,” for Whitman-inl uenced multitudes. Joaquín is many things. He rides with Don Benito Juarez; he is “the blackshawled / Faithful women”; he is “Aztec prince and Christian Christ.”37 It is a poem that echoes and one-ups in homage Langston Hughes’s “Negro,” a poem that begins, “I am a Negro” and then goes through a series of diferent qualifying identities such as slave, worker, singer, and victim; it is a poem that perhaps also draws from Carl Sandburg’s poem that begins “I am the people – the mob – the crowd – the mass.”38 All of these are poems of a collective, permeable identity with activist desires. “Yo Soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín” is just one example among many possible examples. Kaplan Page Harris, for instance, in “Causes, Movements, Poets,” discusses another larger example of poetry’s one-time cultural activism – the “beneit” readings that were advertised in the 1970s in the Bay Area journal Poetry Flash.39 Harris’s list contains around twenty-two beneit readings that he noted between 1973 and 1980 in the Bay Area alone. It is a telling list. There were readings for farm workers, for women, for the People’s Community School, for the Greek resistance, for stricter regulation of nuclear power plants, for the prisoners of San Quentin, and so on. However, as Harris notes, beneit readings more or less faded away from the listings in the 1980s. Similarly, I keep thinking here of how the “I am . . .” poem has mutated from the inclusive and activist drive of “I am Joaquín” in the early days to something like Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got that Name,” which begins, “I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin” and is all about Chin, not all about “the people” or a speciic group of people within “the people.”40 But my desire here is to suggest that it would be insistently ahistorical to read a poem like “I am Joaquín” as merely individualist and that, at the same time, to read a poem such as Marilyn Chin’s as an organizing tool would probably also be just as ahistorical. The “I am . . .” diferences here are yet another example of the closeness between poetry and cultural activism that was so present 1138 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry in the 1970s and that was no longer so by the end of the century. And yet to give adequate attention to the histories of connection between the community formations that supported the activist language politics of various literatures of the 1970s and the more contemporary poetry in English that includes other languages feels especially important, as this literature keeps returning to this issue of individualism again and again, but in really complicated ways. Let us take as an example the long, established tradition of literature in English that includes Spanish: while Anzaldúa writes, “I am my language,” Edwin Torres, even as he, like Anzaldúa, moves between Spanish and English in his writings, questions the untroubled representation of Spanish – an imposed and colonial language – as marginal and as a crucial marker of anyone’s identity in the Americas. Torres can claim Spanish as a heritage language, as his parents were Puerto Rican. And like Anzaldúa and Gonzales, Torres wrote a manifesto that is in part about language and identity. But his is called “A Nuyo Futurist Manifestiny,” and it is full of a poking, joking “I” and a critique of “knowing” this “I” through languages: “I yo NEO-why KNOW who say NO you say ME I see WHY Know NUYO know YOU . . .”41 In a perhaps less jokey but no less interesting moment, Alarcón’s Snake Poems keeps returning to the phrase “nomatca nehuatl,” which Alarcón translates as “I myself ” (a provocatively doubled singularity). Every time this phrase appears, it shows up as complicated by two languages. One poem, called “Nomatca Nehuatl,” begins with “I myself:” as its irst line; the rest of the poem is a list that begins “the mountain / the ocean / the breeze / the lame.”42 To return to Kim’s work, Zhou Xiaojing quotes Kim at a reading in Bufalo in 1998 talking about Dura as “a kind of strange autobiography.”43 The phrase “a kind of strange autobiography” sums up what makes Kim’s work so resonant. Her work is notably sprawling and insistently places the self next to various histories. Kim’s work, for instance, returns again and again to how the legacies of colonialism are connected. In Dura, she again and again orders her readers to “Translate”; “Translate: 38th parallel. Translate: the irst shipload of African slaves was landed at Jamestown.”44 The 38th parallel, the line that separates North and South Korea, is also the line that crosses the San Francisco Bay (the line on which Kim was living in California when she wrote Dura) and the line that crosses the continent, including the Chesapeake Bay and Jamestown. In “Lamenta,” in the book Commons, she includes notes on vivisection from Vesalius, passages from Da Vinci’s notebooks, retellings of conditions in war-torn regions, locust plagues, and environmental crises. In one especially moving passage, the poem juxtaposes a irst-person account of the 1980 Kwangju uprising in South Korea with the 1992 bombing of Sarajevo. 1139 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr The piece is clearly attempting to put disparate moments in dialogue with one another, to suggest something about the diiculties of understanding the events of the contemporary. Much of Kim’s work avoids the “I.” Here it is, buried toward the end of Dura, tellingly meta-deleted: “[the irst deleted me written over.”45 I keep thinking here of the attention to linguistic recognition called for by Judith Butler’s most recent work. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler’s interest is in how our complicity in the violence done to others, even when we are not the doer of the violence, deines us; how we have an obligation to give an account of this; and how this accounting – if it is to be something like ethical – has to be disorienting, full of the languages of others. She puts it this way: “We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange is conditioned and mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimentation of norms that are social in character and that exceed the perspective of those involved in the exchange.”46 In Frames of War, Butler extends these concerns with how we deine ourselves into how we deine others into and out of the category of the human. Among the things to be recognized are claims of language and social belonging: “If we are to make broader social and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persistence and lourishing, we will irst have to be supported by a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging.”47 Butler asks, “What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability? What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to produce more radically democratic results?”48 It is with an interest in the claims of recognizability, in recognition, that I began this discussion with two books that include Narragansett by writers who do not claim Narragansett as part of their identity. Both these books take up the question of the implications of writing in English; both acknowledge the presence of other languages and the complicated histories that language use carries. Both these works suggest that literary representations of the self in their most intimate moments beneit from including relations to others, even those not present in the room; and both argue for recognition of interrelations, and of interdependency. Notes 1. Myung Mi Kim, Commons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 108. 1140 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry 2. Werner Herzog and Marc Shell (eds.), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 3. Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. xv. 4. Alastair Pennycock, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 14. 5. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643; Bedford, Mass.: Applewood, 1997). 6. John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 53; James Thomas Stevens, Combing the Snakes from His Hair (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), p. 107. Stevens’s collection will be cited in the text as CSH. 7. Donne, Complete English Poems, p. 125. 8. Princess Red Wing, “Lesson in Our Native Tongue,” The Narragansett Dawn 1:1 (1935), p. 18. 9. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 54. 10. Rosmarie Waldrop, A Key into the Language of America (New York: New Directions, 1997), p. 3. This collection will be cited in the text as KLA. 11. Myung Mi Kim, Dura (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1999). 12. Myung Mi Kim, Under Flag (Berkeley, Calif.: Kelsey Street, 1991), p. 29. 13. Myung Mi Kim, The Bounty (Minneapolis: Chax, 1996), p. 23. 14. Kim, Dura, p. 79. 15. Joseph P. Balaz, Ola (Honolulu: Tinish Network, 1997). 16. Francisco X. Alarcón, Snake Poems (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992); Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que oy viven entre los indios naturales desta Nueva España (1629; Mexico City: Secretária de Educación Pública, 1988), and in English translation, Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain, trans. J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983). 17. Alarcón, Snake Poems, p. 19. 18. Mark Nowak, Revenants (Minneapolis: Cofee House, 2000), p. 83. 19. “About Arte Público Press,” http://artepublicopress.uh.edu/arte-publico-wp /about-arte-publico-press/. 20. Haunani-Kay Trask, “Writing in Captivity: Poetry in a Time of Decolonization,” in Cynthia Franklin, Ruth Hsu, and Suzanne Kosanke (eds.), Navigating Islands and Continents: Conversations and Contestations in and around the Paciic (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 51–55, 55. 21. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 296. 1141 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Jul ia na Spa hr 22. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), p. 81. 23. Darrell H. Y. Lum, “Local Genealogy: What School You Went?” in Eric Chock et al. (eds.), Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry from Hawai‘i (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1998), p. 13. 24. Bradajo ( Jozuf Hadley), Chalookyu Eensai: Three Poems in Pidgin English (Honolulu: Sandwich Islands, 1972). 25. Philip K. Ige, “The Forgotten Flea Powder,” Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writer’s Quarterly 1 (1978), pp. 56–59. 26. Eric Chock et al. (eds.), Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers (Honolulu: Petronium Press/Talk Story, 1978). 27. Eric Chock, Last Days Here (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1990); Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1993). 28. Rodney Morales, “Literature,” in Michael Haas (ed.), Multicultural Hawai‘i: The Fabric of a Multiethnic Society (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 107–29, 108. 29. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 1. 30. Steve Evans, “The Dynamics of Literary Change,” The Impercipient Lecture Series 1:1 (1997), p. 23. 31. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 115. 32. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, pp. 45–46. 33. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, pp. 354–55. 34. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 332, 333. 35. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 2007), p. 246; Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? with A Cloud in Trousers and To Sergey Esenin, trans. G. M. Hyde (Bedminster: Bristol Press, 1990), p. 88. 36. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Message to Aztlan: Selected Writings (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001), p. 12; Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 47. 37. Gonzales, Message to Aztlan, pp. 21, 29. 38. Langston Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 24; Carl Sandburg, The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, ed. Archibald MacLeish (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), p. 71. 39. Kaplan Page Harris, “Causes, Movements, Poets” (unpublished manuscript). 40. Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1994), p. 16. 1142 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054 Multilingualism in Contemporary American Poetry 41. Edwin Torres, The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (New York: Roof, 2001), p. 109. 42. Alarcón, Snake Poems, p. 27. 43. Zhou Xiaojing, “ ‘What Story What Story What Sound’: The Nomadic Poetics of Myung Mi Kim’s Dura,” College Literature 33:4 (2007), pp. 63–91, 64. 44. Kim, Dura, pp. 97, 68. 45. Kim, Dura, p. 98. 46. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 28. 47. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso, 2009), p. 2. 48. Butler, Frames of War, p. 6. 1143 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California, on 11 Aug 2018 at 03:48:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511762284.054