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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Sara Laws has authored articles in Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger and in the Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies. She has lectured on twentieth-century American poetry and poetics, college writing, and avant-garde Asian American poetry at Mongolia International University, Beijing Normal University, Northern Virginia Community College, and American University. She currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Abstract

In its representations in contemporary mainstream American society, particularly in “mindfulness” discourses, American Buddhism appears synonymous with a series of familiar concepts—interconnectedness, wholeness, ego transcendence—that appear to be Buddhist but are more accurately traced back to Romanticism and humanistic psychology. Readers’ understanding of what Buddhism “looks like” in American poetry has been shaped and consolidated by these Romantic concepts, which have been widely popularized by the useful tools of mindfulness. However, Buddhism as it is inscribed in American poetry is far more diverse than just one sublime aesthetic, even if literary criticism on Buddhist American poetry continues to emphasize the Romantic elements of Buddhism in American poetry. This article differentiates the work of three poets—Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger—by showing the Buddhist “spaces of mind” in their poetries so as to expand and make more accurate our understanding of how Buddhism has become indelible in American poetry. In Kyger’s and Whalen’s poetics, Buddhism is encoded not through sublime images, as in Snyder’s work, but through mundanity and ordinariness. The stakes of outlining this understudied lineage of Buddhist poetics are high: we must add both accuracy and complexity to our scholarly and readerly senses of Buddhism in American literature.

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