lyric subjects 33autobiography through considerations of race, cultural inheritance,
ethnicity and gender. In the USA in particular, the rise to promi-
nence of the personal lyric (often referred to as the ‘workshop’
lyric) during the 1970 s and 1980 s is connected to the proliferation
of creative writing programmes in the academy. The increasing
professionalisation of poetry had its roots in the post-war years,
and in the fl ourishing of New Criticism we can trace the basic
premise of the workshop poem as a well-crafted, self-suffi cient
composition. Moreover, during this time in the USA, identity
politics – the categorisation of different groups often according
to race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation – found a fertile
and often recuperative role in contemporary poetry. Essentially
identity politics focuses upon the experience of often marginalised
communities as enabling possibility for political discussion and
action.
Cathy Song is sometimes identifi ed as a Hawaiian, Chinese-
American or Korean-American poet. The immediate compendium
of distinctive, yet coexisting identities is addressed in her work, as
well as the history of the immigrant experience in the USA. Song’s
narratives are intensely personal, but her poetry also voices a col-
lective immigrant cultural history. The entitling of her fi rst volume
Picture Bride ( 1983 ) emphasises this concern immediately.^15 Critic
Gayle K. Fujita-Sato states that:
Picture brides was a method of arranging marriages used by
Japanese and Korean immigrants before the war. Usually a
man would ask his parents or relatives to fi nd a prospective
bride, and the couple then exchanged photographs of them-
selves. When marriage was agreed upon, an offi cial ceremony
was held in the home country before the woman departed to
join her husband. In many cases the picture bride’s arrival
was the couple’s fi rst face-to-face meeting.^16Picture Bride maps out spaces for often-unobserved women’s
activities, such as acts of applying make-up, cooking and sewing.
In ‘The Seamstress’ this sense of invisible tasks or silent histories
is made evident through the descriptions of the single-voiced nar-
rator. The seamstress informs us that she works in ‘diffi cult light’