Jason Koo: June 2021 Poet of the Month
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
NO REST
“There is a constant drain of energy which
might be better used in redefining ourselves,”
says Audre Lorde, and I think about this
any time someone sends me an email demanding
I send another email explaining, i.e. repeating,
what I’ve already said in a previous email
meant to preempt (but not read and resulting
in) their email, or when a student asks me
about something I’ve detailed in a document
such as the syllabus or assignment guidelines
that I expressly put together in such a fashion
to preclude that very question, or when I’ve doubled
down on my attempt to preclude that question
by going over said document in class and a student
asks me something that I literally just provided
the answer to five seconds before I (stupidly) asked
if there were any questions and that the sad
document also (stupidly) included the answer to,
questions that would’ve been precluded
had everyone simply, i.e. actually, been reading
and/or listening at all. Lorde was talking about
something more serious than unnecessary emails
and student questions, but there’s a connection,
how the oppressed are expected to teach their oppressors
their mistakes, “to stretch out and bridge the gap
between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness
of the oppressor,” as when I have to explain how I do
not possess sexuality as an Asian American man
in the American cultural imaginary, there being no
representations of Asian or Asian American men
kissing or “making love” or god forbid fucking
in American television or film, unless they’re the butt
of a joke or with Asian or Asian American women,
and even these instances are few and far fucking
between, the thought of a man such as myself
kissing or doing anything deploying this wretched body
with a woman of color let alone a white woman
is apparently too much for all ye immaculate asshats
to bear, and when I say too much of course I mean
laughable, the idea is ridiculous, unless I’m in a fantasy
land where I’m hang-gliding down to White Castle
to binge on thirty sliders and four large Cherry Cokes
and Doogie Howser miraculously shows up to pay
for them when he finds out I’ve lost my wallet,
allowing me, finally, to unsmirk my jackass boss’s
face and make out with my hot neighbor Maria
spontaneously in an elevator, or the earth has been
overrun by flesh-eating zombies and I can capitalize
on the dearth of available let alone trustworthy men
—not shockingly even more dire than before—
by winning the heart of a lovely, resourceful white
Southern girl who’s happy to stick a knife in the forehead
of my enemies, even marrying her in a charming
non-legal ceremony before being bludgeoned by a bat
named Lucille wielded by an alpha white male
in a black leather jacket, the charismatic asshole
who’s shown up, with gleeful savagery, to restore order.
And then I get a bland, not-too-concerned, slightly
mystified “Huh, I’d never noticed that before,” as if
I’d been talking about the thin layer of dust lining
the inner bottom lip of a framed wall hanging
in an American home. But this is my life, or non-life,
I’m telling you about, how exhaustingly I’ve had
to work to render my puny sexuality at all
non-puny to this nation, “puny” because still
the first thing that comes to mind when anyone
(even other Asian men, even, sometimes, myself)
imagines an Asian man having sex is a little
dick, as if that were the sole preserve of Long
Duk Dong and Co., what’s absurd is that nowhere
are we actually seeing the body of Mr. Dong
on screen, so how does anybody even fucking know?
From personal experience? Kindly raise your hand
if you’ve seen the penis of an Asian man in your lifetime.
Case in point: during one summer in New York City
after my last relationship was over, I tried Tinder,
curious to see who was out there beyond my usual
circles and thinking the app would accelerate
my dating, at this point in my life I was 37 years old,
I’d finally achieved some semblance of confidence
in myself as a sexual entity, which took, oh, two decades,
I was dating all kinds of women, black, white,
Latina, Asian, you name it, younger, older,
doing all kinds of things professionally,
I no longer had a type (white), as I thought I did
before I’d really dated anybody, no longer lived
in a small town in Missouri or North Carolina
where I had no options but had to accept whoever
would have me, this was New York City, where a face,
a body such as mine, were actually on the radar.
In two months of using Tinder I got
ten matches. All of them Asian women.
I went out with two, both terrific people
(the only reason I don’t completely regret using
the app), but if ever there was a definitive picture
of how racism works in my life, this was it.
I vanished. Women I possibly could’ve met
and attracted in real life did not see me at all
when reduced to an image, a preconception.
Rather than accelerating my dating life
and expanding my options, as the app seemed
to do for everyone I talked to, even people I knew
who were horrible at meeting people in real life,
it slowed it down, I was now spending all my time
and energy trying to figure this fucking thing out,
expanding my searches even outside the city,
until finally I just swiped right on everybody,
as a friend of mine suggested, just to see if I was
being too picky, and still no more matches.
Even Match.com, the only other dating app I’d used
before that, in 2007, in North Carolina, yielded
more matches, and with white women, despite
—or perhaps because of—most of their profiles
saying they were looking for a white Christian guy
who made six figures. At least the racism there
was out in the open, but here, in New York City,
where one expects better, it played out silently
in swipes. I know what you’re thinking: poor me,
right? This is all the racism I’ve had to encounter?
Um, no, but hold that thought, because it’s part
of the problem I’m so exhaustively trying to describe.
Both of the Asian women I went out with had
hundreds of matches, seemingly per day.
I know this because I asked them to show me
and couldn’t scroll through the end of their lists.
I showed them mine. They laughed. I asked them
why they’d swiped right on me, if they were so coveted
and I, so clearly, was not. They said, I only date
Asian guys. In other words, the pool had to be limited
to Asian guys for me to reappear, for these features
to surface as “attractive,” I could separate myself
only when there were eyes that separated that type
of self at all. Whereas their type was already a separator,
they were fetishized, they only dated Asian guys
to try to avoid this problem, one of them had a face
that white dudes see in their most lavish imperial dreams
of the Orient. What’s better, to be invisible
or fetishized? Like a rock and a hard place, neither
is great, but at least when you’re fetishized you’re invited
to the table, you’ve got a puncher’s chance at revealing
your identity, whereas when you’re invisible, you do
not. It’s the difference between not really being seen
and not being seen. In Missouri, I took an Asian American
lit class (in which I was the only Asian guy present)
and would read about all the problems Asian American
women were having being exoticized and think,
Please, exoticize me! It’s a problem I want to have!
I left class and walked between the blonde, baked faces
blinking past me as if I were about as interesting
as the back of an envelope, it didn’t occur to them that I
could be considered sexually. And here I was, a man
in my late 20s, entering my prime years of sexual eligibility,
so to speak, tall, smart, creative, clean, funny, passionate,
ambitious, with a job, a car, my own place, experience
in love, in sex, from a good family, without major baggage,
and none of that added up to sexy, despite what any
women’s magazine let alone actual woman in my life
had to say to the contrary, I was churning with qualities
American culture had led me to believe were desirable,
many of which had been hard earned through years
of clumsy learning, but I’d become the man without qualities,
I wasn’t even a man, I was just without qualities,
my Asian American lit teacher tried to sum up this problem
for the class when we discussed M. Butterfly by citing
the joke about what you call a gay Asian couple
(“lesbians”) and only I understood the punchline.
My friends in the writing program, all of whom were white
and in significant relationships, living with someone
they were about to marry or already married
and having kids—I went to no less than four weddings
and three baby showers during my four years there—
were mostly amused by my problems, didn’t think
of them as “problems,” I’d go out with my best friend
to one white spot after another and tell him my only chance
of being noticed at all was if I was mistaken
for Jackie Chan, I was told this twice while I lived there,
otherwise I was just some random math teacher
or foreign exchange student or tech guy, and he’d look
at me, slightly incredulous, and say, Do you really
think that’s how people see you? and just by using
that word “see” proved he didn’t see the problem,
thus making me unseen twice over, first for not
being seen, then for not being seen as not seen,
even by one of the few people, I thought, who could
see me. He didn’t see my problems as having
to do with race, he wasn’t alone in this, my whole life
my very own mom has been telling me the same thing,
that I shouldn’t complain about racism, that’s just
an easy out, I should put my head down, work hard-
er and good things will eventually happen to me,
this is how she and my father achieved success
as immigrants from South Korea, it’s the model
minority way, I know this way well, I’ve been wearing
it away my whole life, and my mom’s not wrong,
taking more SAT prep courses and practice tests
than any non-Asian kid I knew in high school
helped me, I suppose, get over the racism latent
in the test to do well enough on it that I got over
the racism of comparing Asians against other Asians
to get into Yale, getting into Yale and working hard-
er than everybody else to catch up on all the books
they’d read in their non-immigrant households
then lap their reading many times over helped me
get noticed enough by my famous white professors
that they’d write me recs, those recs and the Yale
imprimatur probably helped more than any poems
I’d written to get me into the MFA and PhD programs
of my choice, the director of my PhD program
said in a student newspaper article how proof
of the high national regard of the program was that
now Ivy League grads were applying to it, which
was interesting, Yale apparently mattered more
than any talent that was revealed in my poems,
as my mom always said it would, she wasn’t wrong,
this was true probably for every teaching job
I’ve landed, we all know almost nobody in the academy
besides poets reads poems, and if they do, not
contemporary poems, and if they do that, not
by poets of color, and if they do that, not by
straight Asian American men, this was certainly
true for my current job, at a university just
twenty minutes from Yale and always conscious
of its rather large shadow, when someone picked
me up from Union Station in New Haven
for my campus visit, the first thing they said was,
Well, you’re no stranger to this place, are you?
even though I hadn’t set foot there in fourteen years,
spending that time trying to make myself stranger
and stranger to everything it represented, to be seen
as a poet, not a Yale grad, I learned in grad school
that virtually everyone besides other Ivy League grads
looks at you with suspicion if you say you’ve gone
to Yale, it immediately makes them think they know
something about you, that you’re a snob, or rich,
or wannabe white, or all of the above, but what
you certainly are not is a real writer, you can only hope
to be an academic, so I started leaving Yale
out of my author bio for cover letters or publications,
went out of my way not to mention it if someone
asked me where I went to school, which drove my mom
crazy, she said, You’ve chosen the one profession
where having a Yale degree doesn’t help you???
She wasn’t wrong, or right, it’s helped me, and it hasn’t,
I got my current job because of it but it’s not tenure track,
nor was any other job I’ve gotten, I can’t compete
for the most coveted jobs because I don’t have purchase
in the marketplace, not even as a token, when other
POC complain about the problem of being tokenized
I can’t help but think of the sad irony of their privilege
compared to mine, my problem is that there is no
problem, nobody talks about or even seems to think
about the problem of the lack of Asian American men
in writing teaching positions or publishing, every year
VIDA counts the percentage of women being published
in journals compared to men and the numbers are appalling,
but how about we compare the number of women
to Asian American men? I can always count on one half
of one hand the number of Asian American men
I see in a journal, or in a press’s roster of authors,
or as part of a reading series or writing faculty, this number
shrinks if I look for straight Asian American men,
even more if I look for such men who are poets,
even more if I look for such poets under the age of 45,
even more if I look for Koreans, there’s just me,
or not me, I remember Lorde saying in an interview
with Adrienne Rich how when she was diagnosed
with cancer she wanted to find solace in another
black lesbian feminist with cancer and realized,
Hey, honey, you are it, for now, words which just jumped
out at me, I don’t have cancer and my problems
are nowhere near as painful as all the shit Lorde
had to deal with, but I heard her speaking directly
to me, Hey, honey, you are it, for now, you’ve got
to make it on your own, and I have been trying
and trying and trying and trying and trying
to make myself manifest to the American public,
long poems are not the best way to go about it
but I seem to keep writing these to be exhaustive
in my efforts, to make it impossible, I suppose,
to miss me, just as I exhaustively try to go over
everything with my students so they don’t miss
what I’m saying, to preempt the emptying of me,
and I’ll think I’m starting to get somewhere
then see a list that comes out about the best
Asian American poetry books of 2018 and I
am not on it, even though I had a book come out
and had a big launch party for it in Brooklyn
and run Brooklyn Poets, which you’d think
would make me more visible to the author
of the article, a young Asian American woman
who used to intern at Kundiman, which hosts
its annual retreat in the city, whose founders
and executive director know me, but nope,
and sure, yeah, maybe the author read the book
and didn’t like it, she has every right, but there
were only two men on that list, one gay and the other
I don’t know, the rest of the poets were women
and no one on the list was Korean, she admitted
at the beginning of the article to not having read any
Asian American poets just a couple years before,
so, I don’t know, come to your own conclusions
about what happened here, swipe, then I see another list
of “funny” Asian American poets and I am not
on that either, say what you want about my poetry,
maybe it’s not the “best,” maybe it’s not your cup
of choice Asian tea, but one thing it is is goddam funny,
I’ve been making audiences laugh at readings
for twenty years, and it’s not as if they expect to laugh
at a poetry reading, they don’t just give you laughs
out of courtesy or pity, the worst part about this
was that the author of the list, a rising young gay
Chinese American poet, knew me, in fact he’d just done
two readings I’d set up for him in Brooklyn
and at my school, when I invited him and said I admired
his work (which is true), he said he admired mine too,
which touched me, I believed him, I’ve seen him
critique fake fans on Twitter who say they admire
your work then reveal pretty quickly in conversation
they haven’t read it, I thought, Well maybe my work
is getting out there, when he visited my school
we talked about the lack of representation of Asian
American men in the literary world, something,
you know, I was doing my part to try to correct
by inviting him to do these two readings and teaching
his book in two classes, then he goes and leaves
me off this list, “leaves me off” is too strong, I don’t think
I even occurred to him, almost all the poets on the list
were women, save for one gay male and one nonbinary,
the list was actually a “playlist” for a new poetry app
that a former Brooklyn Poets student of mine developed
so you can read sample poems by poets according
to some organizing theme, I read all the poems
and found one funny, I found zero things funny
about the whole situation, my founding Brooklyn Poets
had inspired my student to do something entrepreneurial
and create the app, I’d helped this poet by setting up
two readings for him to reach more readers, one
of whom was this student, who invited him to make
the playlist after the Brooklyn reading, I’d basically
created the conditions to watch my own erasure,
swipe, then I see another playlist for the same app
featuring Korean American poets and I am not on that,
swipe, any day now I am going to see a list of Funny
Korean American Straight Male Poets from Cleveland
and I won’t be on that, it’ll just be blank, swipe,
these lists hurt more than Tinder because I am not
even matching with other Asians, they presumably
have nothing to do with my face or assumed dick size,
the pool of possible poets for each of them is so limited,
creating the ideal conditions to notice honey here,
who is it, for now, and honey is not, honey is not
asking to be included on a list of best poetry books
of 2018 or funny American poets or American poets
overall, honey is not asking for the National Book Award
or Pulitzer, honey is not asking for white recognition,
honey is asking to occur to somebody, even as just
not occurring, especially other Asian American poets
and most especially Asian American men, this is exhausting,
being nowhere a notion in the American imagination,
all this energy expended to preempt what turns out to be
a prepreemptying of me, a swipe before I’ve even begun,
“swipe” is too strong, that implies I was there at all,
when I’m just trying to begin, being, begin, instead
of redefining how you see me I’m just trying to get you
to see me unseen, writing a poem I never wanted
to write, and that you, knowing you, will never read.
Note: "No Rest" is from Jason Koo's new manuscript of long poems, No Rest of the Essay, recognized by Claudia Rankine as one of four finalists for AWP's Donald Hall Prize for Poetry in 2020.
Jason Koo is the author of the poetry collections More Than Mere Light, America's Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island. Coeditor of the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, he has published his poetry and prose in the American Scholar, Missouri Review, Village Voice and Yale Review, among other places, and won fellowships for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute. An associate teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University, Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge (poetsbridge.org). He lives in Beacon, NY.
