Ithaca College Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship Presentation

1. Ithaca College Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship Presentation Christine KitanoPhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing, Texas Tech UniversityMarch 4, 2014

2. Framing Questions • How does a writer construct a unique, individual voice in a poem? • How does the individual voice in a poem engage with and respond to the external world?

3. Dissertation: Sky Country (a collection of original poetry) Title from the Korean word for heaven “하늘 나라” (a kenning that translates literally to “sky country”) Two Major Thematic Sections 1) Persona Poems Addresses how to construct unique, individual voices. 2) Poems that reimagine the internment and immigration experiencesAddresses how the individual voice in a poem engage with and respond to the external world. Creative Work

4. Current Scholarly Projects “The Self-Reflexive ‘I’ in 20th Century American Poetry: T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Yusef Komunyakaa”-Answers the question: How does a writer construct a unique, individual voice in a poem? “Against ‘Lyric Testimony’ and Ethnic Essentialism: Reading the Japanese American Internment as Archetype”-Answers the question: How does the individual voice in a poem engage with and respond to the external world? Scholarship

5. Steven Yao’s formulation of “lyric testimony” “…the minority subject typically relates events from a personalized history that exemplify racial/ethnic identity as a traumatic condition of either problematic difference from mainstream society or debilitating cultural loss” (14). • First-person narrative poems • Speaker not distinct from poet • Drama revolves around speaker testifying to “problematic difference” or “cultural loss” Scholarship

6. Critiques of “lyric testimony” • Echo the critiques of its mainstream counterpart (Confessional poetry) • Poet’s presumed failure to transform personal experience into art • In Asian American poetry, this presumed failure has broader consequences Scholarship

7. Ethnic Essentialist Readings • Ethnic essentialist readings posit simplistic equation between ethnic/cultural experience and the text of the poem • Poems by writers of color are often read as one-way windows into cultural experience, as artifact instead of art • Assumes there are authentic, stable cultural traditions that can be neatly transmitted through text • Limits the types of expression available to ethnic poets • Poems are read as a means to understand another culture, rather than as poems in their own right Scholarship

8. Research Questions Reframed • While Yao’s formulation of the “lyric testimonial” mode is helpful, when he groups a number of writers into this mode (Li-Young Lee, Cathy Song, David Mura, Arthur Sze) he also glosses too quickly over the role of the poet by assuming too strong a connection between speaker and poet. • How do ethnic writers write about cultural experience? • How do ethnic writers approach shared cultural markers (such as the Japanese American internment) in a manner that is aesthetically responsible? Scholarship

9. “Against ‘Lyric Testimony’ and Ethnic Essentialism: Reading the Japanese American Internment as Archetype” • Reads the work of Lawson Fusao Inada, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan • All poets directly address the Japanese American Internment • What does a poem do that a book of nonfiction does not? • The drama in the poems cannot rely solely on internment as “traumatic condition of either problematic difference from mainstream society or debilitating cultural loss.” • Effective poems avoid essentialist readings by placing emphasis on the individuality of the speakers and the forms of the poems themselves. Scholarship

10. Screenshot of article on POETRY Magazine Website, February 27, 2014 (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/247362#article) Scholarship

11. Teaching Philosophy • How does a writer construct a unique, individual voice in a poem? • How does the individual voice in a poem engage with and respond to the external world? QuestionsReframed: What choices are available to a writer when crafting a poem?Focus: technique, craft, relationship between form and content Pedagogy

12. Typical Discussion Class • Read through poem • Students identify literal situation and various emotional effects • Students identify the poetic techniques (lines, images, sounds, etc.) that create these emotional effects, and how these effects reflect the literal situation • Summary of poem vs. experience of poem Pedagogy

13. Proposed Courses “The Individual Voice in World Poetry” Related courses:WRTG 19400-01: “The Slave and the Master:” Investigations of Race, Class, and Gender in Hip Hop”WRTG 19401-01: Writing the West: The Construction of Self and Other from 1492 to the Present • Read poets from United States & England, then Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia • Focus on technique and craft (poems are forms of individual aesthetic expression) • Consider how poems arise from/respond to particular cultural, historical, political contexts Pedagogy

14. Proposed Courses “Writing the Engaged Poem: A Poetry Workshop”Related courses:WRTG 19404-01: Origins: An Exploration of Heritage through Research and Creative and Expository WritingWRTG 31000-01: Women and WritingWRTG 31800-01: Writing from Cultural Experience • Encourage students to step out of their direct experience and experiment with different traditions and techniques • Experiment with different levels of engagement • Help students recognize their place in the global community, and help them make informed decisions as to how to engage larger issues in their work Pedagogy

15. Current Progress and Timeline for Completion (as of March 2014) 1) Dissertation (manuscript of 40 original poems) Progress: 25 poems written, 10 poems accepted for publication at Tar River Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Atticus Review, Miramar, and others. Defense Scheduled for April 20152) Article: “The Self-Reflexive ‘I’ in 20th Century American Poetry” Progress: In final revisions, will be sent out for publication in April 2014.3) Article: “Against ‘Lyric Testimony’ and Ethnic Essentialism: Reading the Japanese American Internment as Archetype” Progress: In revision, will be sent out for publication in Fall 2014. 4) Article: “The Asian American Elegy” Progress: In drafting stage. Projected final draft Fall 2015.