David Mura's Poetics of Identity

In a 1989 interview, David Mura said that "everything I write, except for certain pieces of criticism, reflects an outlook which is conditioned by my being Japanese-American ... " (265). But for Mura, being Japanese-American used to be "a source of shame or inferiority," and he sought to minimize his attachment to any minority group, for fear that he would be labelled as a minority poet, whose poetry, "as seen from much of the American literary establishment," was "crude, unschooled, and untalented, filled with the understandable but regrettable cliches of oppression." He felt that to be taken seriously as a writer, he must associate himself with canonized White male poets, rather than with the "unskilled, anonymous minority poets" ("Intellectual Biography" 37, 40). However, as he came to find that none of those poets' works reflected his own life experience, he recognized the conflict in his position as a poet who denies his own ethnic identity and experience.(1) When he eventually began to confront and accept his ethnic identity, Mura realized that his identification with poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman was similar to his parents' identification with "the middle class whites of America." "We had come to so identify ourselves," says Mura, "with the Victors, with the rulers, that we had denied our own experience" ("Intellectual Biography" 41-42). In confronting his ethnic identity and the Japanese-American experience, Mura opens up new areas of inquiry and new artistic challenges and possibilities for his poetry. Evoking James Baldwin's remark that "No true account really of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary,"(2) Mura argues in an essay on the diversity of Asian American poetry that Any poet who wants to describe [minority Americans'] experience must somehow violate the accepted practice of the language, must bring into the language an alien vocabulary and syntax, rhythms that disrupt, images which jar, ideas which require a totally new relationship to the language and the reality it contains. ("Asian American Poetry" 171-72) However, Mura finds that critical readings of Asian American poetry have not adequately dealt with Asian American poets' experimental poetics. In the same essay, Mura raises questions about critics' tendency to read Asian American poetry "solely from a social/historical model," and to "insist that it delineate a representative reality or experience." As an example, he cites from Mayumi Tsutakawa, co-editor of The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology (1989), who writes that in the process of selecting manuscripts for the anthology, they "had to bypass some manuscripts reflecting experimental forms," and some which "did not carry a recognizable Asian voice."(3) Mura notes that such critical models "reduce the complexity of language and our experience," therefore, he stresses the need to fight against "urges to simplify the field" of Asian American poetry ("Asian-American Poetry" 172-73). Garrett Hongo has made similar critical remarks about reductive models of reading Asian American poetry. In his introduction to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993), Hongo contends that critics' "categorical dismissal for literary qualities" in Asian American poetry results from "an unconscious assumption that what was essentially Asian American was a given work's overt political stance and conformity to sociological models of the Asian American experience" (xxxv). He suggests that it is such "rigid constructions of ethnic identity" that have led to reductive interpretations of Asian American poetry and to "exclusively materialist models of our experiences" (xxxvi-xxxvii). Such models may help reinforce the kind of bias toward minority poetry Mura referred to, and may even inadvertently help perpetuate the reductive treatment of ethnic literature as "ethnography rather than art," as Bonnie TuSmith has pointed out in her provocative essay, "Opening Up Theory" (69). …