From Poet to Critic and Back Again

I was a poet long before I even knew what a critic was. Children may be taught, as I was, to read poems and to write their own, but nobody teaches a kid to be a critic (although plenty of them are naturals). Insofar as we encounter literary criticism when we’re young, it’s generally in the attenuated form of papers for an English class, which are geared more toward teaching the fundamentals of writing than toward educating students in literary interpretation. Not to mention, the job of “critic” hardly offers a young writer romantic role models the way that poets do. There must be plenty of aspiring high-school poets who idolize, as I did, Keats or Dickinson or Plath or Stevens, but I don’t generally see teenagers with posters of I.A. Richards or Helen Vendler on their walls.

Like most young writers, I didn’t encounter the concept of criticism until I got to college. And like most undergraduates, I learned of criticism as a “secondary” kind of writing that took as its object the “primary” texts of literature. Poets wrote poems, then critics wrote about the poems. Although my aspiration was still to write poetry, I started to get the message, rather to my chagrin, that maybe I was a better critic than poet. A famed poet with whom I took a workshop didn’t have much positive to say about my poetry, but praised my work on a secondary set of assignments: writing capsule reviews of books of contemporary poetry. Criticism needed my voice, said this eminent writer—something no one had ever said about my poems!

At the same time, I was beginning to discover that writing about poetry could, in fact, be a satisfying and enriching practice. Like most students of poetry, I was initially schooled in a mode of close reading that placed the language on the page in splendid isolation, challenging the reader to find relationships among the words that were there and excluding everything that was not there. Close reading, as old-fashioned as it sometimes seems, is still the basis of my critical practice, and a great close reading can illuminate things about a poem we’ve never seen before, no matter how many times we’ve read it. But I also came to find that criticism could help me create a richer context around a poem, understanding its place in history and its role in advancing the art of poetry. One instructor told me I had a talent for literary history; it wasn’t until years later that I realized this wasn’t meant entirely as a compliment. Still, it remains the case that I really value criticism that is able to place individual poems in a broader historical narrative.

For all my growing interest in criticism, creative and critical writing remained far apart in the classroom. Workshops followed the standard model: the only texts were the poems of my classmates, perhaps supplemented by a few poems by contemporary or classic poets. I was continually haunted by the sense that I didn’t “get” what my instructors and peers were looking for in a poem, but there was really nothing to help me out, other than a vague sense that my tastes were not quite correct or refined enough to help me write at the level of sophistication expected of me. Meanwhile, my classes in literature and sociology were pushing me toward understanding aesthetics and poetics as not eternal absolutes but historical and social constructs, often deeply implicated in, and responsive to, politics.

My first inkling that poetry and criticism might intersect more deeply came when a maverick instructor introduced me to language writing, which at Harvard in the mid-90s was still largely ignored or dismissed. The work of Charles Bernstein, particularly his books Content’s Dream and A Poetics, presented “criticism” that was also “poetic,” eschewing the conventions of academic writing in favor of a more spontaneous, polemical, and lyrical mode that was nonetheless informed by literary and critical theory. (Sometimes, as in his essay “Artifice of Absorption,” it was even written in verse.) While I was never quite able to write like Bernstein, his work led me toward a more engaged model of criticism that also helped me to understand my own growing dissatisfaction with the creative practice I had encountered in my workshops.

I gradually found myself, much to my surprise, becoming more of a critic than a poet. “English professor” was certainly a profession I could never have imagined as a young writer; yet there I was, starting a Ph.D. in English—and mostly ceasing to write poetry. (The relationship of literary criticism to academia is a topic for another day.) Much of the criticism I was reading—and writing—was highly skeptical of the so-called mainstream lyric, which suited me insofar as I didn’t seem especially capable of writing good examples of mainstream lyric.

But it was ultimately criticism that brought me back to writing poetry. My critical work became increasingly focused on Asian American poetry and on the way such poetry responded to the stereotypes of Asians that circulate in American culture. Still, I had long been uneasy with engaging Asian American identity in my own poetry, in part due to my skepticism toward the autobiographical mode that seemed required of the Asian American poet. It was reading, and writing about, the work of writers like John Yau and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha that opened up for me new possibilities for Asian American poetry, in which issues of race, history, and culture were engaged even as the notion of a coherent Asian American self was called into question.

My first poetry collection, 100 Chinese Silences, could be seen as criticism by poetic means. As a series of rewritings of poems that thematize Asia or Asians in some way, the book excavates the orientalism at the heart of modern poetry, from Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese to Billy Collins’s ironic invocations of the Chinese art of silence. But just as criticism helped me push beyond the limits of what I understood as a poet, these poems sought to use voice, lyricism, and humor to get inside this orientalist tradition. What I found in writing these poems was something I couldn’t have imagined as a critic: that poetic orientalism was part of my own poetic voice, shaping the inheritance that all contemporary American poets share.