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Or another, entitled “Hometown Lost”:
Riasanovsky, who wrote all his poems twice, once in English and once in Russian, comments in his poem notes, “There is such a thing as ‘émigré’ culture—located somewhere in the interface between two or more cultures. It is in this sense that I tend to write ‘interface’ poetry.” Hilary Conroy, who as a young man was thrust out of his Normal, Illinois, upbringing into a world of Japanese and other Asian-Pacific people in a context of war and occupation, developed a lifelong interest in such interfacing. Although perhaps most widely known as a regional historian of the Far East or East Asia and a historian on the nations of that region, to use categories that dominated the academy through the twentieth century, he has always stretched toward world (or even cosmic) history with all the accompanying implications for methodology, reconceptualization, and boundary crossing. His approach anticipates the full sense of the term “world history” as discussed by Arif Dirlik in his 2005 article, “Performing the World,” in that it involves not only transnational but translocal spaces; for example, “ethnic and diasporic spaces.”11 Conroy’s “interface thinking,” though capable of ascending to the abstract in, for example, the cosmic history seminar’s contemplation of the limits of using any one language alone to approach truth, also descends quite pragmatically to the concrete—the empirical—in his studies of both diplomacy and migration.