Sidewise Looks: Asian American Poets Revisit Wallace Stevens

Abstract:While common knowledge on Wallace Stevens suggests that he influenced only one Asian American poet (his friend, the scholar Peter H. Lee), a fuller investigation into Stevens's legacy reveals that he very well may be the Anglophone modernist with the most widespread and enduring influence on the past eighty years of Asian American poetics. In this essay's first half, I retell the history of Stevens's reception by Asian American poets, distinguishing it from his reception by Black poets (on the one hand) and from Asian American poets' responses to modernist orientalism (on the other). In the essay's second half, I offer a flexible argument about the indispensability of Stevensian abstraction to two of the most celebrated poets of their generation, Arthur Sze and Vijay Seshadri.