Lew, Walter K. - Excerpts From: ∆IKTH 딕테/딕티 DIKTE, for Dictee (1982)

Walter K. Lew’s “critical collage” titled Excerpts From DIKTE for DICTEE (1982)1 may
not be a step toward gaining Theresa Cha a popular audience, for its attention to, and
adoption of, Cha’s methods in DICTEE and in her own theoretical writing lead it into
avenues of expression that often seem just as “uncanny”2 and revolutionary as
DICTEE itself. Lew, an artist who has worked in many fields, including film and poetry, a scholar of Asian and Asian American literature, and a translator of Korean poetry (his extraordinary translations of Yi Sang appeared in the Winter, 1992 issue of Korean Culture), is one of the few Asian American critics to have been actively attentive to Cha’s work for the entire decade since her death in 1982. He dedicated his brief anthology of Asian American poems for the journal Bridge (Winter, 1982) to Cha, and in the last line of his introduction, “A New Decade of Singular Poetry,” writes “We never met, but her brilliant book of texts and graphics, DICTEE, points to possibilities that any serious Korean American artist should contemplate as we enter a future that threatens essential continuities.”3 Lew’s interest in “continuities” has survived into Excerpts (observe the year, 1982, in his title), and he seems to be saying in this dedication that Cha’s complex, experimental, uncanny and ultimately sincere DICTEE is a good place to start."

 - Brian Kim Stefans