Before The War; Poems As They Happened

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Legend has it that at a time of emerging Asian American consciousness but few visible Asian American writers, Frank Chin and his friends happened upon the book cover of Down at the Santa Fe Depot , an anthology of Fresno-based poets. Struck by seeing an Asian face in the group photo of the poets, they discovered and contacted fellow Asian American writer Lawson Inada. Inada's collection Before the War: Poems as They Happened was one of the first Asian American single-author volumes of poetry from a major New York publishing house. Inada's poetry stands out in its consistent engagement with jazz. Before the War begins with a whimsical portrait of a Japanese American figure playing air bass; includes tributes to jazz musicians and singers such as Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Billie Holiday; and ends with poems written for Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. Riffing on the term bluesman, Inada calls himself a campsman, suggesting that his blues derive from Japanese American internment. He describes his project as blowing shakuhachi versaphone and cites jazz as the strongest influence on his writing. Calling live performance his favorite form of publishing, Inada appropriates the value that is ascribed to a finalized, written text for a mode that is oral and dynamic. Inada s poetics suggest that there is more than one way to tell a story, that many stories are embedded within a given story or within what we know as history. This multiple sense of time implicitly critiques the notion of a standard time or history that is equivalent for all subjects. On Being Asian American refers to an echo generated by the actualization of the racial subject. We can see a poetics of the echo in the repetition enacted in this poem as well as in the poems Instructions and Two Variations. This repetition is what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls "repetition with a difference: a non-linear, non-teleological aesthetics of change.