This essay questions what would be the ‘space’ of new poetics in the inter-disciplinary era, how archives, historical documents, and testimony affect and reconstruct poetry writing and reading practices. Reading Wing Tek Lum’s The Nanjing Massacre: Poems reveals how history and literature can be reawakened as a form of ‘belated witness.’ The Nanjing Massacre: Poems is a series of snapshots not just of human cruelty but also of human compassion, and finally draws a vivid landscape of the buried, the forgotten, the unsaid, the unacceptable, the unpleasant. Wing Tek Lum invites readers to rethink the space of new poetics in the era of inter-disciplinary studies and cultural fusion, especially when poetry is trapped in social and historical contexts in the ‘numb feel’ of a particular era. His poetic language and form touch the numb feeling, the impossible, and reconstruct the possibility of communication in the imagined space where disaster and tragedy reside. His poetic experiments with documents bridge history and literature, Asia and America. Is his ‘belated witness’ doing the impossible task of recovering the lost voice of history, crossing the boundary of languages and borderlines? My answer is, with the arrival of witness, the space of American poetry is expanded not just as a territory but as the form of amalgamation, merging facts, documents, and imagination. Finally, it undertakes resuscitation of the dead, severely marginalized space of poetry in this Dead Poets Society.
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