This paper examines the themes and technical strategies in the experimental
poems by three 20th-Century Asian American women poets
—Cathy Song, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Kimiko Hahn— through close
reading. While challenging Bloom’s theory of “poetic influence” and
Anglo-American feminist theories for constructing an alternative tradition
of women writers, my analysis considers the importance of the
subject positionalities of gender, race, and ethnicity in shaping the poetics
of Asian American women poets.
