I’m a sexual being and a sexual body – and have been for a long time. I write poems from this very sexual body. Even poems that aren’t explicitly erotic (though I’ve published many) are written by me as a sexual body.
I’ve posted about this before, but we could ask the same things about fiction and poetry books. I wonder about publishers, editors, reading series curators; I wonder what their expectations of Asian male sexuality is. I’ll name four poets off the bat: Justin Chin, Joseph Legaspi, Li-Young Lee, and me. All different. All REALLY different. There is not one Asian male sexuality. How do Hollywood, the publishing industry, the art world, construct a monolithic (or absent) public expectation of Asian male sexuality? How do Asian male poets contradict those expectations outright? The poets I mention here, we are all carnal – not in the way the word is used in moral judgment – but in terms of its root: i.e. of the flesh. We are of the flesh. And as the body moves in many ways, so does the movie, the story, the poem.