Furious Dialectics: Diasporic Anger in the Poetry of Li-Young Lee

Abstract

Although Li-Young Lee frequently presents himself as a poet of the absolute, his work is often demonstrably driven by a substrate of anger. Examining Lee’s first collection, Rose, this chapter shows how diasporic anger both influences Lee’s formal practices and shapes his self-understanding. As I strive to suggest, the collection develops what might be called a poetics of failure, a way of making poetry out of the failure of poetry. This poetics enables Lee both to tap into and to contain diasporic anger, ultimately generating what I call diasporic irony - an exile’s version of the literary and philosophical tradition of romantic irony. In substantiating these claims, I hope not only to call attention to anger as a recurrent and generative feature of Asian American literary and cultural production, but also to contribute to the renewed attention to form in Asian American literary criticism. Often dismissed as merely content-based, Asian American poetry is in fact formally innovative, and its formal innovations have everything to do with the sociohistorical and political conditions of its emergence.