Does poetic justice endure? Does it migrate from modern to post-modern forms?

What kind of justice does poetry function to achieve? In the Preface to Leaves of

Grass, Walt Whitman says that great poet “judges not as the judge judges but as the

sun falling around a helpless thing.” It is a startling statement about poetic justice that

has stayed with me. Almost conventional as a formulation of what one ought to do,

the statement nonetheless strangely hitches the function of poetry to a particular kind

of justice. The idea is that poets address the social and psychic predicaments of their

time through some mechanism of parity. Poetry does not represent or replicate the

helpless thing; it judges by making it available for sight.

Is this broadly applicable as a statement about poetry and justice? In

conditions of which that private and public tyrannies render coherent speech

impossible, what kind of truth does poetry as the extrajudicial court provide? If poetry

is an instrument of justice, does it mention the unjust by name or does it illuminate a

situation? These are questions about the purpose of poetry that I would like to test on

a set of post-modernist poems from the 20th century—experimental poems that still

very much have justice and ancient retributions in mind. I’m interested in the

instances where the forms or linguistic features of poetry changes but its fundamental

interest in righting wrongs has not changed. I want to understand what kind of curing

power of the “poetic in-sight” is at play when social and historical justice is missing.
 My education in social sciences and literary studies complimentarily consolidated

my interest in a poetic justice. My experience with social sciences gifted me with

fluency in classical social theories and a systemic mindset that searches for the

complex dynamic behind social events; however, after conducting research in gender

and sexuality research using both quantitative and qualitative methods, I realized

observations, analysis of data points, and in-depth interviews fail to capture the

truth/realness that only poetry can, through which the creative genre recover insights

about imagination, psychodynamic, illusions, and immanence especially when it

comes to traumatic or socially nonconforming experiences. Poetry, although

extremely vigilant about aesthetics and linguistic forms, does not overlook the

“triviality” of life.

My interest in a poetics of justice is inspired by Professor Nan Z. Da’s class in

World Literature and Literary Theory. For the first time in my life, I have words for

the invisible gadgets in my intellectual realm that identifies the changing semantics

and restrained communicability of thoughts in social interactions. Roland Barthes

insight of the temporal and atemporal units in narrative shows me how causality can

be traced horizontally and vertically, which makes knowing the mechanism of one

thing leads to the other possible. My sense of urgency for the poetic justice comes

from Professor Da’s insight into identifying the problem of post-Maoist China as a

literary tragedy. By that I mean, in an extremely turbulent justice system erasing the

demarcation of public and domestic sphere, “Li” 理, the key concept of Chinese
intellectual history, loosely translated as coherence, know, or reason, is destabilized to

the state of annihilation. Grew up in a provincial area and witnessed extreme social

economical change, I often fail autoethnographically with parsing right from wrong

because the language is distorted and actuality itself is hard to trace in traumatic

events. (My hometown feels like a crack stuck in between the dated historical

consciousness and insubstantial narrative of progress.) Thus, the act of seeing through

poetry becomes urgent because other accounts may be unreliable and are constantly

censored. That is the fundamental logic behind my deepest interest in the poetics of

“sight.” I want to make the helpless things “in-sight” through pursuing criticism that

gaze into the area of darkness and dilating the poetics lights. Poetry does not judge by

forming an opinion; it first judges by “illuminating.”

One site of my investigation might be global Anglophone rewritings of scenes

from antiquity and ancient mythology by women poets after 1950s through the

comparative and interdisplinary lens. The intrigue of adaptation of myth is in its

ability to intervene with ancient tragedies and contemporary phenomena. Philip

Hardie suggests that mythology provides a setting for issues of cosmic, psychological,

and moral order and disorder. Poets have the liberty to rewrite and recreate mythology

to engage the current psychosocial issues. Hinging on the 20th century tragedies of

forced migration, cross-cultural clashes, and imperialism, poets rediscover and expand

on the universal themes of separation, trauma, and misdeeds in ancient mythology. I

am interested in tracing what has or has not changed in the new stories of different
writers, and whether their communal mythological approach works along the poetics

of justice.

My current project originates from the structuralist approach to mythology and

veered away to observe the psychodynamic of cross-cultural subjects. It examines the

rework of The Hymn to Demeter in postmodern works of women poets, for example,

Louise Gluck’s Averno and Theresa Hak Cha’s Dictee. I wish to argue that both

works address violence and melancholic loss and contest representability; in fact, both

works intricately echo Walter Benjamin’s take on the aura that past events cannot be

replicated or recreated through the action of writing. The selection of work Although

Cha’s poetry is more experimental in form, both Gluck and Cha emphasized the

processes of injustice, addressing the tropes of harms and the impasse of speech in the

aftermath of crimes. They both bring forth the salience of silence while revealing the

complexity of victim-perpetration relations, inevitably a concern of morality. They are

interested in, other than pragmatically righting a wrong with immediacy, what poetry

can preserve for the constantly wronged people? It is a question of poetics and

modernity.

Eventually, I seek to bridge or discern differences between multilingual

reception of myth in English, Chinese, and Spanish poetry, especially in finding

philosophical and conceptual tools that may straighten wrongs (subtle and drastic) in

the poetics realm. I also wish to entangle the capability of mythical poetry in inciting

real change. (Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism identifies mythic tales as the

therapeutic and radical site of sporadic social changes). Other than postmodern
women poets, I want to study the relation of human and supernatural animal/nature in

Chinese poetry. I understand a comparative project requires proficient language skills

in Spanish and possibly Greek. I expect to spend 2023 spring and summer in

intensively learning those languages.

School:

-professors in poetics;

-multidisplinary – collaboration with east Asian studies, classics department

etc.

-strength in teaching training – mention the story of stoner – emotional support

and new way of thinking –