Not silent

Timothy Yu finds poetry for this political moment

by

One of this young century’s great literary feuds began on April 18, 2011, right here in Madison, at Union South.

It was part of the celebration surrounding the opening of the lavishly revamped building, Union South 2.0, and the former poet laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, was the headline literary event.

Timothy Yu, a poet and associate professor of English and Asian American Studies, was impressed with the turnout in Varsity Hall: “There were 1,200 people there,” says Yu. “I thought, wow, what kind of poet can bring out 1,200 people?”

Collins, as popular a poet as there is in the United States today, was wowing the crowd. “He’s very funny and witty — the audience would laugh appreciatively at the right moments,” recalls Yu.

Then Collins read a poem titled “Grave,” about visiting the joint gravesite of his parents. In it, he asks them what they think of his new glasses; the answer is only silence — what Collins calls in the poem “one of the one hundred kinds of silence/according to the Chinese belief,/ each one distinct from the others.”

Yu, whose parents were born in China, was taken aback. “I was like, okay, I’m not a world expert on everything Chinese, but that belief doesn’t sound familiar to me.”

Later in the poem, after Collins has elaborated on the 100 kinds of Chinese silence, he admits that the concept of the silences is something he made up.

“When he said, ‘I just made that up,’ I was like, ohhhh,” says Yu, groaning as someone might at a very bad pun. “I was very aggravated.”

At that moment, Yu vowed he would write those 100 Chinese silences.

The book that emerged, 100 Chinese Silences, takes “Grave” and rewrites it. It also takes on 99 other poems and writings — from poets as famous as Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore to popular contemporary figures such as Mary Oliver and Gary Snyder — which marginalize or objectify Asians or “Orientalness.”

There was no shortage of source material. Yu rewrites 22 poems from Billy Collins alone. In Yu’s poem-responses he expresses frustration, outrage and wry humor.

You might say that one of this young century’s great literary feuds was born on April 18, 2011, right here in Madison, at Union South. But for it to really be a proper feud, wouldn’t Collins have to respond? Wouldn’t he have to know the battle was joined?

“I certainly have seen no evidence that he is aware of this project,” says Yu, who notes that his book is published by Les Figues, a small California press specializing in poetry. “The likelihood that he would have seen or heard about it is probably pretty low.”

Another kind of silence, then.

Yet Yu’s public profile is rising. He has been active in getting more ethnic studies teaching positions in place at UW-Madison. He just had a poem, “Moon,” published in The New York Times Magazine. His latest poems address the state of race relations in the U.S. and even — forget Billy Collins — Donald Trump.

Power over the image

“Nobody speaks in a vacuum,” says Yu, sitting in his office in the Asian American Studies department in Ingraham Hall on the UW-Madison campus. “You don’t just say, ‘I’m Asian American, this is who I am.’ That’s always a response to some way someone has characterized you.”

Yu names the obvious, overtly racist stereotypes of the “buck-toothed, pidgin-speaking bumbling foreigner.” But there’s also the “model minority” Asian stereotype.

Then “there’s this other thing, from the poets who really love Chinese poetry and translate Chinese poems and love Li Po and Tu Fu and are so appreciative of ancient Chinese philosophers.” Yu calls this the “long tradition of white writers praising Chinese culture while ignoring Chinese people.”

What frustrated Yu so deeply about the Collins reading was “the idea of the Chinese as silent, reticent, deferential — not speaking for themselves. What was so deflating about the twist of his using this stereotype and then winking and saying that was just a joke is that he has the ability, the privilege, to make that joke… and then flaunts his power over this image.”

By re-writing the works of others, line by line, Yu says he’s “acknowledging the power that writers like Collins have to set the terms of this conversation.”

But in writing the 100 Chinese silences, isn’t Yu wresting that power away by giving voices to the “silent” Chinese?

“That certainly is one way to see it,” Yu says, “but I don’t know that the Chinese can speak in this framework.” Yu thinks that “even if you do speak, what you say is still read or framed in a certain way. We don’t have the freedom to say whatever we want, to assert our own identities.”

Yu is gratified that Asian American readers have responded to the book positively: “They find a lot of the poems very satisfying. They feel like I’m socking it to somebody — whether that was my intention or not. There’s a politics in the book that’s about reacting to and pushing back against a particular tradition, a particular way of thinking.”

Poetry in the age of Trump

Not that long ago, when Yu was teaching about Japanese internment camps and the Chinese Exclusion Act, it felt like those things were in the past. Now similar issues are in the news every day. Antipathy toward immigrants “has happened before and it will happen again,” says Yu. But in trying times, finding “new forms of solidarity” has been helpful to him in grappling with what’s happening.

Yu took part in the “Writers Resist” reading at Gates of Heaven in Madison in mid-January. He was also active in the “Because We Come From Everything: Poetry & Migration” project in March, through the Asian American literary organization Kundiman. “I’ve been participating in Kundiman since the mid-2000s and it’s provided a community of other Asian American writers, not something I realized I needed until I discovered it,” says Yu.

These days “a lot of people are feeling very helpless,” Yu says. “They want to do something, but they don’t know what.” The project as a whole addressed what it means to be an immigrant or to come from an immigrant background. Throughout March, Kundiman organized a postcard poem swap where each day 50 members wrote an original poem on a postcard and mailed it to another participant. They also posted the poems on social media, hashtagged #wecomefromeverything.

“What’s the purpose of something like that at a moment like this? You realize you are not alone,” Yu says. The project underlined for him art’s role in creating links among people. The postcards were “an intimate gesture,” he adds. “Exchanging a physical piece of mail with someone was important. Writing something to a specific person felt very powerful.”

Yu has also written several poems more directly targeted at this moment in our political history. His current project is a rewriting of John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. “Apparently I don’t have any original ideas of my own,” Yu says with a laugh, “but this is postmodern literature, right?”

Yu’s “Chinese Dream #14” (a takeoff on Berryman’s famous “Dream Song 14,” which starts “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so”) begins “Race, friends, is boring. Everyone says so. Hashtag all lives matter.” Yu also discussed the poem on the Poetry Now podcast this April.

“Writing explicitly political poems is a very hard thing to do,” says Yu. The message should hit the reader powerfully, yet be more than just a rant. Yu’s poem “The Lay of Trump” (another “Dream Songs” takeoff; Berryman’s original was an attack on Eisenhower) is mostly made up of Trump’s own words.

Yu says he made himself read transcripts of Trump’s speeches and was struck not only by his fondness for repetition but by the then-candidate’s obsession with death: “Everybody’s being killed, everyone is killing us. The American dream is dead. America is dying.”

Another of Trump’s obsessions is, of course, China. “The Chinese are killing us and we have to be tough against the Chinese,” Yu says, summing up the Trump line. In the Berryman series, Yu is thinking about “the way in which Asianness or Chineseness is playing in American culture” — and these days, Trump has been using the Chinese to show he’s going to be tough. Yu seizes the contradiction:

I have words, so many. I have the best words.

Jobs, China, I know them. All my best deals

have been against the Chinese. I beat China

all the time.They kill us. We’re dying.

A reason to write

Yu, 42, was born in Evanston, Illinois, and was raised in Chicago and Wilmette. His mother and his maternal grandparents came to the United States in the 1950s, fleeing the Communists. They ended up in Chicago because his grandfather, a journalist, wanted to study at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. “In my family, there was great respect for writing,” says Yu.

His grandfather, eventually realizing he would never write well enough in English to sustain a career in journalism here, switched to advertising. Yu’s father came to the U.S. from Taiwan in the late 1960s as a graduate student. His mother was a teacher in the Chicago public schools; his father traveled frequently to Asia, working for U.S. computer technology companies.

Yu’s interest in poetry started early. In third grade, his teacher encouraged him to enter a class assignment in a statewide student poetry contest and he became, at age 8, the youngest person ever to win one of the prizes. More memorable than the prize itself was that it was presented to Yu by the then-poet laureate of Illinois, Gwendolyn Brooks.

“At the time, I didn’t appreciate how significant of an event this was,” he says. But today he treasures the photo (that his mother recently found in a box) of him standing with Brooks at the ceremony.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Yu switched from English to an interdisciplinary major called Social Studies, but then added English back in as a minor. He wrote a thesis on contemporary poetry and politics, focusing on the then-obscure group of writers called the Language Poets.

He says that he never really considered an MFA program in poetry — he “knew enough that I wasn’t going to make a living as a poet.” He taught English at a private high school in Boston for two years before heading to a Ph.D. program at Stanford to study contemporary poetry. He met his wife, Robin Valenza, at Stanford (she’s now also a professor of English at UW-Madison); the couple have a five-year-old daughter.

During graduate school and his first years of teaching, he was “on-and-off writing poetry, but not actively trying to publish it. That took me a really long time — as a creative writer I’m a late bloomer.”

He started taking his poetry more seriously when he found the community of other Asian American writers. “What I do, what I write, actually matters to this group of people,” Yu says. “I want to do my work so that this audience will read it. And I could see it was reaching that audience in certain ways. I was like wow, okay! Now I feel like I have a reason to write!”

Wendy Lee, a professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, taught 100 Chinese Silences in her Asian American literature course this spring, where it fit into the tradition of Asian American texts reacting to popular representations of Asian Americans in film, television and other media. Yu’s book shows how this “writing back to exoticized representations” continues, says Lee. Students liked how the poems responded to a range of different texts — other poems, articles in The New York Times — and not just one representation, says Lee.

Sunny Chan, a graduate student working with Yu on her dissertation, says he is one of the few people anywhere who knows much about her topic: experimental poetry of the Asian diaspora and its relation to new media. She was initially hesitant about relocating from her home in Canada to UW-Madison, but “Tim was so charming and convincing,” says Chan. She likes that he’s active in the community, not just on campus, and recalls his involvement in protesting Act 10 in 2011.

“He’s never authoritative or lording it over you” as an advisor, says Chan. “He’s receptive. At the same time, he is the expert in the room.”

Encountering Yu only from 100 Chinese Silences, you might conclude that he’s a very angry guy. But in person he seems unflappable, enthusiastic, gently bemused, keenly aware of society’s ironies. That’s evident from the sly twists in his poems, but also in many of his Facebook posts.

“I’ve learned that Amherst College” (Amherst, Mass., and specifically the college, being the home of Emily Dickinson), “is voting on a new mascot and that one of the options is ‘The Fighting Poets,’” he posted this spring. “This led me to consider other possible mascots for a college of poets.” Sure, you have to have more than a passing acquaintance with the canon to get the humor behind his suggestions “The Barbaric Yawps,” “The Brides of Quietness” and “The Hollow Men,” but if you’re into this kind of stuff, you know you’re dealing with a fellow traveler, one who loves literature.

His love of sports is also evident in his oft-quoted blog post about Jeremy Lin, the Harvard-educated Asian American NBA player, and his importance to Asian Americans: “He’s everything we are, and everything we’ve been told we could never be.”

How is this still a thing?

As Yu was looking for source material for 100 Chinese Silences, he found many more than he expected as he branched out from Billy Collins. Friends started sending him suggestions. Yu points to the most “cringingly racist” base work that he included as a poem by Tom Clark, “Sounding Chinese at Inspiration Point,” which is written in pidgin-style English — and was published in 2006.

“Right?” says Yu, incredulous.

For “Silences,” Yu found seeds for material in such disparate sources as Facebook memes (“Based on Chinese philosophy of Feng Shui. Those who read and do not copy will be without money,”) and a 2013 interview with Canadian novelist David Gilmour, who was not shy in declaring that he had no interest in teaching the works of women or Chinese authors in his classes.

The parody of Gilmour’s words is biting and quite funny (“What I teach is guys, real guy-guys. Heterosexual, not Chinese”) but, as with many of the Chinese silence poems, it can be hard to grasp the points if you don’t know the original work. Fortunately, many of the Silences’ source texts are just a Google search away.

A more public controversy occurred in 2016 when Calvin Trillin published a send-up of Chinese cuisine-loving American foodies in The New Yorker called “Have They Run out of Provinces Yet?”

Yu was one of many who objected to the poem’s white bias, its exclusion of Chinese American readers. “It continues an American tradition of talking about Asia as if we Asians were not in the room,” Yu wrote in an opinion piece for the New Republic.

Trillin’s defenders argued that his verse was not meant to be other than humorous doggerel and mocks pretentious foodies, not the Chinese. Yu acknowledges that “on the surface, Trillin’s poem seems harmless enough.” But ultimately he places the verse in the “much longer tradition of American poetry about China, one that uses Chinese objects, Chinese culture and even Chinese bodies to express white American anxieties and desires.”

While it seems that it’s long past time for this kind of treatment of Asians to be over, Yu is philosophical.

“Reading any author, you come to certain points in their work and it’s this sinking feeling,” says Yu. “Here’s someone whose work you love and you come to a moment that’s so disappointing. Is that how this writer would see somebody like me? A woman or an Asian or an African American?”

Despite the dismay this can cause, Yu refuses to reject the canon: “If you read the great writers of the American tradition, you’re gonna see some ugly stuff.”

He returns to something his poet friend Robert Archambeau said about what parody is. “Parody is not angry, parody is not ‘I hate this thing.’ It’s ‘I kind of love this thing, and even though I have an ambivalent relationship to it, I live inside of it and I can’t get out of it.’”

Though Yu is comfortable pushing back against American poets who might ignore or misinterpret the experience of Asian Americans, he counts himself part of that world. “The only language I speak is English, the only language I write is in English. The tradition I write is in American poetry,” he says. “I want to acknowledge that these poems are part of the tradition that I am also inside.”