ABSTRACT

This chapter overlays the poetics of Pohnpei's first published woman poet Emelihter Kihleng, with an exploration of active agentic responses to forms of Anglo-American imperialism. Poems and poetry-making provide the material—literally in Kihleng's case—through which responses not only record the impact of imperialism, but also offer other ways of being, seeing and hearing the world. As a 'poet-scholar,' the author critique and connect Kihleng's title poem with one of his own title poems, 'Fast Talking PI.' An urohs is an appliqué skirt customarily sewn, worn, exchanged, sold and bought by Pohnpeian women. Overlapping literary criticism and Pacific cultural studies, the chapter considers the impact of imperialisms in the work of an ahpw kahsPohnpeian-American diaspora-educated poet and an afa kasi Samoan-English diaspora-born and -raised poet. A poem offers an effective type of impure scholarship in the sense that it openly taints itself with subjectivities—the emotional, the personal, the political, and the brazenly positional.