‘Journeying is Hard’: Difficulty, Race and Poetics in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade

Amidst a growing consensus amongst critics that a discussion on race and white privilege in British poetry is long overdue, few have theorized on race and racism in relation to contemporary British BAME poets and their concomitant poetics. In being attentive to how BAME poets continue to be routinely othered by various critics, I will reflect upon my positionality as a BAME poet-critic who considers literary criticism to be a crucial means to respond to exemplary work being produced by contemporary British BAME poets, with the aim of disseminating contemporary BAME poetry in forums which are less welcoming to non-white or non-Eurocentric voices and perspectives. This article will examine whether parody can be construed as a form of resistance, which can be deployed to counter racialized/racist notions of difficulty, readability and authenticity. As the case study of my exploration of contemporary British-Chinese poetry, Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade will be closely read to illuminate the inextricable 'connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies and events' (Said 1983). Through offering a textual analysis of Howe’s collection with due attention to her politics and poetics, I aim to reveal how Loop of Jade has broadened the definition of linguistic innovation in contemporary British poetry and practice through its scintillating use of parody and hybrid poetics.

' initiative, which seeks to 'welcome a new generation of writers into the RSL, and to celebrate the talent and diversity of Britain's younger writers'. 3 However, these accolades have played an inadvertent role in fostering controversy among several (white, male) critics in the UK, which led in turn to a media backlash from female poets who -in response to a disparaging Twitter comment by the journalist Oliver Thring -coined the hashtag #derangedpoetess to express the fury they felt in the wake of Howe's perceived mistreatment by the press. 4 I raise these literary controversies not to detract from Howe's poetry and poetics, but rather to begin the work of reflecting critically on how BAME poets in the UK are rarely afforded the privilege of having their work critiqued in a manner which does not, in the words of Dorothy Wang, 'explicitly oppose political and social "content" (including racial identity) against formal literary concerns'. 5 In spite of the uneasy relationship between transnational readings and nation-focused critical arenas, markets and canons, Wang's contention that poets of colour remain read either for their 'race' or for their 'poetics' certainly pertains to the ongoing discussions on race and review culture in the UK. During a panel on the role of the poetry critic at the 2018 Ledbury Poetry Festival, Ledbury Poetry Critic Sarala Estruch astutely observed that 'when faced with reviewing the work of a BAME poet, the critic today too often falls into the trap of focusing on the cultural origin of the poet rather than the work itself'. 6 Indeed, Howe's work has been odiously applauded for its 'oriental poise', 7 while simultaneously attracting derision from a handful of critics who (mis-)read Howe's skilful use of intertextuality and linguistically innovative forms throughout her collection as being symptomatic of an 'intellectually abstruse' poetics. 8 Such notions of (un-)readability and difficulty are often deeply racialized, particularly when one considers, in the words of Kayo Chingonyi, how a 'structurally racist literary culture might influence a myopic reading of work by BAME poets'. 9 In response to those critics who insist that Howe ought to '[work] harder to write with the difficult clarity and complex simplicity of which she is capable', 10 I wish to note that some poets do not consider 'clarity' or 'simplicity' to be necessary traits of their work, particularly those who draw inspiration from an avant-garde poetic tradition. Simultaneously embedded in this clarion call to 'simplicity' is a veiled demand that a BAME poet's work come across as 'authentic', which is reflected in Ben Wilkinson's analysis of Howe's work, as he observes how 'the Hong Kong of Howe's early years is a fecund territory for a poet seeking to reconcile a quintessentially English life with a starkly contrasting Eastern heritage'. 11 While aptly acknowledging Howe's multiple heritages, such commentary brings to mind what Prina Werbner describes as, 'one key criticism often levelled against the notion of cultural hybridity, [which] is that it assumes the prior existence of whole cultures, a vision of culture much discredited in contemporary anthropology'. 12 There is also the problem of Howe being orientalised as the 'native informant' who is presumed to have unfettered access to an ' authentic' Eastern heritage by virtue of having been born in Hong Kong. Yet it perhaps escapes the inattentive critic that Howe comes to her Chineseness in Loop of Jade not through accessing primary Chinese texts (be it classical or contemporary), but rather via Ezra Pound's Cathay and the Cantos; that is, through Anglophone (Poundian) imitations of classical Chinese poetry, since English is in fact Howe's sole mother tongue. In an interview with Lily Blacksell for the Boston Review, Howe recalls that during her year abroad at Harvard University after graduating from the University of Cambridge (where she read English): 'I spent hours translating Virgil, but hadn't yet thought to study Chinese'. 13 Having moved from Hong Kong, China, to Watford, England, at the age of seven, Howe has been vocal about her fraught relationship to language: 'Voice' isn't a straightforward thing for me: neither my physical voice, nor the unique and unified poetic voice we're all supposed to be trying to find within ourselves. A couple of years after we moved from Hong Kong to Cambridge English academic, whose PhD, Thring observes, was on "visual imagination and visual vividness in language", is to undergo a tutorial sprinkled with wordy phrases: "hyperreality", "double input", "multi-layeredness", "interleavings"'. 15 It is curious as to why Howe's usage of standard vocabulary within literary criticism has been identified by Thring as problematic, considering that certain discourses are demanded by academia, and Howe is indeed an accomplished Renaissance scholar.
Accusations of racism and sexism aside, might this have something to do with the (white) critic's fundamental inability to reconcile the BAME poet's erudition with her racial background? Aside from persistent structural inequalities within British higher education, 16 Thring's issue with Howe's work might also stem from the fact that BAME poets are often praised by critics for portraying a narrow and stereotypical version of ' authenticity'. And this authenticity apparently requires them to perform what Wilkinson calls in relation to Chingonyi's Kumukanda an ' angry and defiant writing'. 17 As Wilkinson continues, Chingonyi produces, ' an authentic and convincing book […] in its many nuanced portrayals and unflinching reflections'. 18 When confronted with a BAME poet whose racial identity defies conventional expectations because it does not (and need not) map directly onto an autobiographical lyric 'I' conforming to racial stereotypes, critics have tended to react in frustration at being unable to, in the words of Howe, 'read […] poems by women, and especially ones from racial minorities, as artlessly autobiographical -as unmediated expressions of lived experience'. 19 This seeming incongruence between one's poetics and race is in turn grossly (mis-)interpreted by critics as a kind of ' difficulty' that requires fixing. Here, I shall now pivot towards a critical discussion of what I consider to be a more valid and important kind of ' difficulty' in Howe's work.
In his seminal article 'On Difficulty', George Steiner contends that any mention of ' difficulty' arising from a literary text can be classified 'into contingent, modal, tactical and ontological difficulties […] [with] manifold combinations between them'. 20 According to Steiner's classification, ' contingent' difficulties concern words or phrases that are not immediately intelligible to the reader, and therefore require the act of 'look[ing] up' a particular reference 21 ; 'modal' difficulties arise when the reader encounters 'something palpably unsettling, even repellent, about the movement and lunge of the whole poem' 22 ; 'tactical' difficulties concern instances when the poet may choose to be obscure in order to achieve certain specific stylistic effects, or when one is ' compelled towards obliquity and cloture by political circumstances' 23 32 It is clear from current academic and literary debates concerning avant-garde poetics in the UK that 'while the relationship between "experimental" or "difficult" poetry and capitalism has been the subject of much compelling critical writing in the UK, little attention has been given to poetry's relationship to race, racism, and the legacies of colonialism', 33  Responding to White's analysis, Parmar argues in her Threads essay on 'Lyric Violence, the Nomadic Subject and the Fourth Space' that 'it is impossible to consider the lyric without fully interrogating its inherent premise of universality, its coded whiteness'. 35 At the same time, Parmar aptly recognizes that ' anti-lyric poetries that emerge from post-structuralism undermine the coherence of a lyric subject […] but to not need to recognize oneself, to render oneself without a voice, is only appealing or possible for those who have not been screened out, marginalised, silenced by the powers inherent in language itself'. 36 In light of these debates, I shall turn to a brief discussion about race and innovative women's poetry in the UK since the 1970s, in order to explore some of the limitations within current discussions on avant-garde poetics; this discussion will, I think about the meaning of blood, which is (simply) a metaphor and race, which has been a terrible pun.  of taxonomy, and based on the application of modern genetic tools in examining human variety, there can only be one logical conclusion: that the notion of discrete 'races' is merely the product of ideology, myth and human imagination, for we are all biologically part of the same human race. 62 That race is socially constructed does not, however, entail that it is irrelevant to the interpellation of individuals across and within cultures and societies. Rather, race is indeed ' a terrible pun', since the fact that people of different 'races' are locked in an unequal 'race' against one another is borne out daily across the world, particularly within capitalist democracies where racial hierarchies often remain systemic and deeply institutionalised. 63 The next couplet, which appears later in the same poem, reveals a ' contingent' difficulty, since words such as 'Babel', 'Mendel', or even 'Quadroon' might require some effort from the reader in terms of research, but the internet is quick to yield At first glance, the end rhyme between 'reference' and 'transference' suggests a link between religiosity and psychoanalysis; yet the act of 'looking up' A Case Study of Transference yields deeply surprising results. Rather than presenting a psychoanalytic case study on transference between psychotherapist and client, Xu Bing (an artist) offers a controversial conceptual artwork titled 'A Case Study of Transference', which consists of a 1994 video performance piece in which two pigs (both imprinted with nonsensical words, one in Simplified Chinese and the other in English) copulate before a live audience, intended by the artist as ' a satirical take on the collision of East and West'. 66 If both cultures (East and West) are equally represented by the image of the pig in Xu's provocative performance art, there appears to be no reason to consider one culture to be more 'legitimate' than the other. Furthermore, if one examines the issue of pork's symbolic meaning(s) from a Jewish versus Cantonese perspective, it appears that both attitudes could be equally repugnant, or equally savoury, depending on one's personal allegiances and ideologies. Furthermore, Xu seems to imply that the mating of the two pigs (one imprinted with nonsensical English words and the other with senseless Chinese characters) will logically produce Chan: 'Journeying is Hard' Art. 22, page 18 of 29 piglets free from blemish (since those ink stains are not genetically inherent to the pigs and have only been added onto their skin artificially by the artist). Is Howe therefore suggesting that aspects we might often consider to be inherent to a culture (for example, a hatred of pork) are a result of 'nurture' rather than 'nature', and thus are less inevitable or ingrained than we might presume?
Ultimately, Howe leaves her reader to ponder a more ' open text' than the poem's lyric form might suggest, which, according to Lyn Hejinian, 'invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and […] speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive'. 67 While select critics have shown an appreciation of Howe's experimentation with form, 68 Howe observes in a conversation with the author of this thesis that her experiences of reading '(d) Sucking pigs' aloud to various audiences around the UK have not been met with the expected response: 'I've stopped reading those poems in the collection that are perhaps a bit "out there" […] the poem "Sucking pigs" was supposed to be funny, but people never laugh'.
With such ' difficult' poems, Howe faces a conundrum: whether to read these aloud to audiences who may be seemingly less receptive to work which seeks to complicate notions of race, culture and poetic voice. Here, I wish to consider the following observation made by Hampson in puncturing the illusion of a homogenous readership: The reader of fragmente or Talus has quite different literary expectations from the person who reads poems in the TLS or the London Review of Books.
There is, then, the paradox […] that, if this tradition of the new is defined in terms of ' countering formal expectations', it produces poetry which, in practice, is sought out by readers who would expect ' challenging' texts, whereas those readers who would really be challenged by these texts are unlikely to engage with them. 69 While Hampson seeks to describe the problems of avant-garde poetics as pure formalist play, I wish to adapt his observation to note that the BAME poet who wishes to adopt an innovative poetics in her writing yet, 1) does not claim to be an avant-garde poet, 2) is not read as such by literary critics who would rather Howe write more Howe's use of the word 'inauthenticity' speaks to her awareness of the false conundrum which troubles the BAME poet: how to appear ' authentic' on the page, if such a thing even exists? The assumption is often that one needs to have access to a certain language and cultural heritage in order to speak ' authentically' from a racialized perspective, but this once again reinforces the problematic notion of a pure ' cultural essence' which certain individuals possess while others do not. In the above quote, Howe suggests that to attempt to explore her Chineseness as someone who does not speak Chinese is to enact a Poundian form of Chinoiserie, even as she reflexively critiques this poetic (and personal) gesture via a parody of Pound's Cathay, as seen in the excerpt below: Late spring. A scholar sits in his study.
After much contemplation he lends his brush the ideal pressureleaves his mind there, on the paper. […] A hand, a brush, its inclinationso involved in an anchoring of sign to thing so artful that we, like the Jesuits, might forget words' tenuous moorings Orientals' 76 -might be loath to encounter yet another a stereotypical Chinese landscape, I argue that we must once again be attentive to the poem's productive 'difficulties'. In this poem, the speaker is an omniscient narrator who includes the reader in his tale with the use of the pronoun 'we', akin to Pound's speaker in one of his most famous Cathay poems, 'Song of the Bowmen of Shu', whose speaker observes: 'Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots|And saying: When shall we get back to our country?' 77 Howe's careful positioning of her scholar vis-à-vis the narrator is necessary for her critique of language's perceived ability to deduce (and reduce) the world to a state of transparency, as she writes: 'A hand, a brush, its inclination -|so involved in an anchoring of sign to thing|so artful that we, like the Jesuits, might forget|words' tenuous moorings'. Howe is eager for us to question this call to a simplistic, knowable, and 'authentic' identity. As such, she invites us to interrogate this presumed link between 'sign' and 'thing' through allowing misfortune to befall her self-satisfied scholar, who eventually 'falls asleep|reflecting how he must write a poem|about the dragonflies' (in a subtle nod to Robert Hass' 'Dragonflies Mating' 78 ), and s ubsequently awakens 'to discover his badly knotted skiff|had disappeared downstream'. Here, the scholar's lost 'skiff' is a playful metaphor and pun on the aforementioned 'tenuous [mooring]' between 'sign' and 'thing', easily untethered, quickly lost to the relentless flow of water, which -in Loop of Jadestands for that which simultaneously divides and connects cultures, peoples and places. Also, while the poem begins with what might appear to be a stereotypical Chinese scholar from ancient China, I wish to note that the scholar's contemplation of (Hass') dragonflies could hint at the possibility of a mixed-raced scholar, somewhat akin to Howe.
To return to Steiner's various modes of literary ' difficulty', the poem '(g) Stray dogs' presents another instance of ' contingent difficulty', since not many readers are necessarily familiar with or well-versed in Pound's Cantos. Pound's autobiographical background presents itself as a kind of 'modal difficulty' which the reader must also contend with; how, for example, is one to approach a poem which, in some ways, elicits sympathy for a distinguished poet-cum-Fascist sympathiser? Once again, Howe relies on the reader to ensure 'that one's homework is done', 79  This poem is particularly complex because it takes poetic and political risks by 'ventriloquizing Pound, who was ventriloquizing Li Po'. 82 Writing in the New Yorker, Louis Menand notes the dangers of having a parody lost on its intended audience: 'Not everyone gets the joke: if you don't already know about the peach, you won't laugh at the prune'. 83 In this poem, Howe's speaker parodies Pound's relationship to Confucius: Pound's recollection of 'Kung' (Confucius) standing at the city gate and being mocked by strangers is akin to the speaker conjuring Pound up in her mind's eye and wondering at his predicament, seemingly out of nowhere: 'To think again of Pound, bared to the sky at Pisa'. The action is multi-layered, such that the reader stands firmly outside the text, looking in on the speaker who is in turn looking into her mind's eye at an imagined Pound who is conjuring up Confucius in his mind's eye. This tunnelling effect has the potential to alienate a less patient reader; however,  Howe's more linguistically innovative approaches through her use of allusion, collage, understatement, parataxis and parody. Criticisms of 'the lyric' made by avantgarde poets remain largely inattentive to the complications faced by marginalised poets (in terms of race, gender, sexuality, class and disability), many of whom face the harsh reality of not being seen as part of the ' all' of citizenry which White gestures at, let alone being 'understood by "all"' within the field of English literature, which has historically been rife with unspoken exclusions. What is equally undesirable, however, is the current phenomenon of literary critics privileging ' a mainstream lyric mode that normalizes difference by fetishizing and orientalising BAME poets for a "universal reader"' 86 who is often presumed to be white. This latter problem is precisely what I sought to highlight at the beginning of this article: how literary review culture in the UK continues to perpetuate problematic expectations that the BAME poet either portray herself as ' authentically' traumatized as the suffering Other, or else come across as the perfectly assimilated migrant who is defiant yet empowered.
It is clear that Howe's work does not fall entirely into the avant-garde, nor does it read strictly as a collection of lyric poems. Rather, Loop of Jade bears testament to the fact that to construct a complex subjectivity as a BAME poet can and should be construed as a radical and innovative act, particularly if we consider how Howe remains the first British-Chinese poet to attain a level of literary success unprecedented across both mainstream and avant-garde poetic camps in the UK. In terms of Howe's renderings of identity, culture and place throughout Loop of Jade, I concur with Capildeo, who states in an interview with Parmar that 'I admire Sarah Howe […] for being able to mention things that of course are there, mixed into home.
[She] reclaim[s] "exotica" as the quotidian'. 87 Ultimately, I contend that the complex recep- "ethnicity", "identity" and "experience", which ought to be resisted by poets and critics alike. Rather than providing the reader with 'ready legibility […] and the presumption to linguistic transparency', 88 Loop of Jade charts new territory within British contemporary poetry by enacting a rejection of what Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten call ' a single cultural logic' 89 within the poetic avant-garde. As Noland and Watten argue: 'in an emerging global culture, it is obvious that a radical innovative poetics must significantly reflect on its cultural location and address rather than rely solely on what Charles Olson termed "radical formal means"'. 90 I also concur with Lisa Lowe, who rightly contends that 'how ethnicity is imagined, practiced, [and] continued is worked out as much between ourselves and our communities as it is transmitted from one generation to another'. 91 In Loop of Jade, Howe's skilful deployment of various Steinerian forms of literary ' difficulty' allow her to successfully convey the historically contingent, imaginative and fluid nature of her cultural identities and concomitant poetics.