The lyric narrative poems and dramatic monologues in Ascensionist ask, What happen when the Other speaks? The poems revolve around the idea of a Subject that endures beyond physical manifestations, that can slip out of its identity and prove identity’s illusory qualities by speaking both dramatic monologue – as if the reader overheard – and normative lyric narrative – as if the reader is saying the poem himself.
The senses of play, invention, and questions of cognition within the poems are inspired by the work of New York poets Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and Alice Notley. From Koch, I draw the attitude of play and straightforward casual diction, as in “How do You Define Bliss, Love?” From Ashbery, I draw the sense of a shifting self as seen in the poems, “Je es un Autre” “Ode to Not Dreaming” and “Wabisabi, Nebraska” a meditation on how one person can become confused with another, and the idea of nostalgia being commodified in the act of baking, in “Cake Kissed.” Alice Notley, a second wave New York poet, inspires the feminist plaint in my dramatic monologues, “French Mother with Tornado Sirens in Background,” the resentful tirade of a mother who has crossed many states, including loneliness, and “Setsuko Hara,” who wishes the film-going public had never paid her so much to be stared at. The manuscript, as a result, explores how a person moving from one culture to another can transcend identity and instead examine identification.
In, “Take it as a Given: Re-Appropriating Hegemonic Texts in Cha’s Dictée,” I explore the ways the visual artist and poet uses ekphrasis to re-appropriate hegemonic or dominating texts e.g. documents of the Japanese occupation of Korea, religious tracts, dictation homework, and prayers from the French occupation of Korea, maps, etc. These texts must be absorbed by the abjected Self so it can grieve the past and move to a more complex identification of the world, rather than resting on simplistic identities. Cha does this work through imitations, double entendres, intermittent use of photographs of women martyrs, the trope of cinema, and even silence. The resultant close reading shows the way her work complicates the current terrain of Asian-American poetry, as well as how the legacy of modernism participates in that mapping.