The English Canon by Adrienne "BadAss" Su

There are a number of poems in this week’s reading that I find exciting and worthy of further exploration. The one I keep coming back to, however, is Adrienne Su’s “The English Canon” in the AAP book (this anthology is such a goldmine for me this semester). Her work is shockingly fresh. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve read a feminist poem that didn’t make me roll my eyes or turn the page feeling as if it had been done a million times before? Or done better? I think, literarily, feminist poetry or feminist-themed poetry has hit a plateau. Whether that’s because we’re at an impasse politically or because we haven’t found a new angle for the old argument, I’m not sure. Even in the Intro to Poetry class I’m TAing for, most freshwomen believed Joan Larkin’s Vagina Sonnet (ridiculously radical at the time it was written) was old hat. One queer student even said, “If I hear one more poem that uses the word ‘vagina’ like it’s revolutionary or something, I’m gonna gag.” I just about fell out of my chair. We, as women, are living in a totally different climate of gender-politics than has ever existed before.

All that said, I think Adrienne Su bypasses all that is “old hat” and addresses feminism, academia, power structures, and even cultural differences (not just among people, but among women) in a way that is fresh-faced, effective and downright radical. This poem moves me. I love first and foremost that the poem is called “The English Canon,” not just “The Canon,” as we (or rather, I) often refer to it, hierarchically assuming that everyone will understand it to be the English one. I don’t think she does this to suggest that canons in other languages are necessarily more inclusive, but rather to point out these levels of access. Excuse the generalization (or call it out), but I’m not sure folks of the English canon (white, male, educated) really believe there are other canons. Or, if they do, that they could ever imagine which poets might inhabit them. At the same time, this poem is showing up in an anthology of Asian American Poetry, written by an Asian American poet, allowing us to assume that maybe this is a book (or poem) that folks of the English canon might not even read; perhaps the designation of “English” is a signifier to those reading this book (Asian American poets or otherwise) that she is not talking about them, per se, but standing in solidarity against this huge oppressive literary establishment of exclusion.

She begins both the first and second stanzas with the phrase “It’s not that…” letting us assume that she’s narrowing the dimensions of the poem’s focus. She says it’s not that women were portrayed seldom and only in a certain light, it’s not that folks of color were ignored except when their exotification added humor and triumph to the poem – but by bringing these things to the forefront of the poem and negating them, we not only know that they happened, but that they do matter. It is about exotification of varying heritages, it is about sexism and the power dynamics between genders. It is exactly that.

What she really means, she says, is that those portrayals have outlasted their time and, where literature is supposed to be a place of access to knowledge for everyone (who can read), the lessons the English canon teaches have perpetuated this marginalized experience for her (and everyone else, let’s be honest). We recognize the power of the English canon and the implications of being published in something like The Norton Anthology or something equally boring & best used as a doorstop. Doorstop or not, we recognize that power, and in recognizing it, understand it to be true on a level beyond our say. Whether or not it is actually true, doesn’t erase its authority.

The way Su ends the poem is sharp and twists hard. She knows we are, in light of the 2nd and 3rd waves, allowed to and obligated to own our autonomy and demanding it. Still, a woman has to be part of the (capitalist) system and make money, a system that still holds up the English canon as The Canon. “Because what do her teachers know, living in books, / And what does she know, starting from scratch?” I fall out of my chair for real at these lines, know so intimately that inbetween point of being part of the system in order to change the system, as the same time that we must question what has come before while simultaneously building up our own classic history from scratch.