Embracing Indeterminacy: Intersections of the Asian American Avant-Garde, Ecopoetics, and the Descriptive-Meditative Structure in Contemporary Poetry

Abstract

This thesis reads poems in Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s Isako Isako and Mei-mei Burssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses to explore how contemporary modes of poetic documentation, description, and meditation can counteract erasure wrought by ongoing mechanisms and legacies of imperialism by embracing the ‘indeterminate’–– that which cannot be definitely or precisely determined. Drawing upon Timothy Yu’s framework of the Asian American avant-garde and various contemporary frameworks of ecopoetry as methodologies of resistance, I explore the ways in which poetry can facilitate destabilization of existing centers of power; reclamation of bodily, mental, and environmental autonomy and integrity; figuration of a lyric speaker as multi-faceted, self-aware, and accountable for the limitations of individual perception; and investment in more holistic, curious, adaptive engagement with the world.