American Poetry And Japanese Culture

The book includes over 600 poems by 65 american poets writing in the period between 1900 and 1950.

The author argues that by using literary trauma theory in conjunction with a reader response approach, readers can gain a better understanding of how poetry can work towards building community and encouraging empowerment over oppression by establishing collectives of people who may share similar stories and experiences connected to trauma. Rather than demonstrating how the poetry may fail or trying to establish what traumatic events the speaker (or poet, in some studies) may have encountered and the significance thereof, this study focuses on how the reader may find community with the ideas represented within the poem. The poetry of various ethnicities are examined, including African American poets Amiri Baraka and Lucille Clifton, Native American poets Robin Coffee, Linda Hogan, and Peter Blue Cloud, as well as Japanese American poets Mitsuye Yamada, Keiho Soga, and Lawson Fusao Inada. Although many of these poets have had their poems examined in the past, none have been explored through this type of approach. Furthermore, very few studies have expanded upon the ideas of literary trauma theory by using reader response, and no writings have examined the idea of ambivalence in poetry as this study does.

Providing comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms, including folk tradition, literature, religion, education, politics, sports, and popular culture, this two-volume work is an ideal resource for students and general readers that reveals the historical, regional, and ethnic diversity within specific traditions. An invaluable reference for school and public libraries as well as academic libraries at colleges and universities, this two-volume encyclopedia provides comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms that enables readers to understand the history, complexity, and contemporary practices in Asian American culture. The contributed entries address the diversity of a group comprising people with geographically discrete origins in the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, identifying the rich variations across the category of Asian American culture that are key to understanding specific cultural expressions while also pointing out some commonalities. Entries are organized alphabetically and cover topics in the arts; education and politics; family and community; gender and sexuality; history and immigration; holidays, festivals, and folk tradition; literature and culture; media, sports, and popular culture; and religion, belief, and spirituality. Entries also broadly cover Asian American origins and history, regional practices and traditions, contemporary culture, and art and other forms of shared expression. Accompanying sidebars throughout serve to highlight key individuals, major events, and significant artifacts and allow readers to better appreciate the Asian American experience.

Ronald Phillip Tanaka's Scenes from a Country Tea Room is an exploration of the Japanese tea ceremony as seen through the eyes of a Japanese-American high school student, Laura Toyoda. Her poems and drawings of various types of pottery often associated with the tea ceremony are an attempt to represent the basic principles of tea, e.g., sabi, wabi (which have no real English equivalents) and wa (harmony). However, in a manner typical of tea, they do so indirectly by allusion, parable and inference. In viewing the tea ceremony through Toyoda's eyes, Tanaka is examining the interface between traditional Japanese culture and some of the core assumptions of our modern global community. It addresses the question of whether or not the principles of the traditional arts have anything of value to teach us other than California zen, the Ninja Turtles and octopus sushi. Finally, Scenes from a Country Tea Room pays homage to the thousands of Japanese and Japanese-American teachers or sensei who, like Matsui Sensei of the poems, have taught and continue to teach traditional Japanese arts in the Japanese-American community since the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the United States over a hundred years ago.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

-- New York Times Book Review