Unusual Woods

The introduction to Unusual Woods, my creative dissertation, offers a critical review of the literature by some of the major professional literary critics such as T.S. Eliot, Helen Vendler, and Harold Bloom on the debate as to how biographical circumstances such as fluency, visible racial markers, or accent matter to aesthetic production and innovation. It also puts forward attentive readings of three poems by three first-generation immigrant American poets who have influenced my own work: Rosemarie Waldrop's "Initial Conditions," Charles Simic's "Someone shuffles ...," and Linh Dinh's "Lang Mastery". Unusual Woods is comprised of 46 13-line ghost-sonnets that assemble and disassemble lyrical myths of origin. The dream logic, internal rhymes, imagistic anacolutha, paratactic syntax, and tonal brio of the voices in these pseudo-sonnets comprise my response to the energy I receive as a reader from formally inventive poetry of the 20th century. The twin strands of learning from history and the passage of time construct the ethical stances and aesthetic expressions of the various "I" personae in Unusual Woods: the martyr, the immigrant/outsider, the captain full of stars, the farmer who lost his cow, the lover, the grave-robbing mouse with a sense of irony, the omniscient historian, the dead man as a complaining oracle, and so on. Tragic elements juxtaposing with absurd and often paradoxical language play to a dark humor. These poems resist Ceausescu's imposed megalomania, the fiction of a singular and knowable self, the logic of linguistic utility, piety as the only source of aesthetic value and ethical seriousness, and the privileging of sense over song.