Taibl is an English instructor and writer. In this essay, Taibl examines Lee's poem in relationship to an Asian-American poetic tradition.

Asian-American poetry developed as an institutionalized category of literature from the 1970s to the 1990s as the first anthologies of Asian- American poetry were received into the literary marketplace. The category emerged along with the work of other marginalized minority writers and, like the work of these writers, has been defined by several specific, observable poetic characteristics, including its use of a personal lyric voice using the "I" pronoun—the lyric "I"—to claim the poet's story. At the same time as many minority writers' voices were emerging, many white male heterosexual writers were involved in the Language Poetry movement, whose goals were opposite to many minority writers' goals. The Language Poets, according to Timothy Yu, in his Contemporary Literature article, "Form and Identity in Language...