There’s a really good conversation going on in the comment section of my previous post on manuscript process, including the question of why 48 pages in the minimum marker of a full length collection.
In my portion of the talk in Willie Perdomo’s VONA class last Friday, I mostly focused on the building of Gravities of Center, how my first DIY chapbook came to be and then opened the way to the first book. I brought up that 48 page minimum requirement, my concern of whether I had enough poetry, quickly mentioned a couple of things about traditional book production and perfect bind as the reasons for the page minimum, and as I said these things, Willie nodded in agreement or acknowledgment.
Apart from myself, Paul S. Flores, Roger Bonair-Agard, Ruth Forman, and briefly Suheir Hammad, also spoke on that manuscript process. None of us questioned full-length minimum requirements, and neither did Willie. We all simply worked to meet this challenge of volume and substantial content, properly ordered, and finely edited by someone whose hardest criticism we trusted.
[Please distribute widely via your social networking tool of choice.]
The Filipino American Center of the San Francisco Public Library in association with Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. presents:
Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. Literary Reading with
Randall Mann, Kristin Naca, Debbie Yee, and Mariano Zaro
Saturday July 11, 2009
2:00 -4:30 pm
Latino Hispanic Community Meeting Room B
Randall Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, BREAKFAST WITH THOM GUNN (University of Chicago 2009) and COMPLAINT IN THE GARDEN (Zoo/Orchises 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize; and co-author of the textbook WRITING POEMS, Seventh Edition (Pearson Longman 2007). He works as an editor and lives in San Francisco.
Kristin Naca’s poems have been published in Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner and Octopus Magazine. She recently graduated with a PhD from University of Nebraska, and MFA from Pitt. Her book Bird Eating Bird was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, for the mtvU National Poetry Series Prize. It will appear with Harper Perennial in September.
Debbie Yee is a trusts and estates attorney and Kundiman fellow. Debbie’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, OCHO, Fence and The Best American Poetry 2009. Debbie blogs irregularly at www.debbieyee.com.
Mariano Zaro was born in Borja (Spain) in 1963 and since 1994 he has lived in Santa Monica. He is the author of Where From/Desde Donde (Bay Books, 1996), Poems of erosion/Poemas de la erosión (Carayan Press, 2003) and The House of Mae Rim/La Casa de Mae Rim (Carayan Press, 2008). Visit his website here.
All programs at the library are free.
San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin Street (@ Grove)
sfpl.org
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Many thanks to Willie Perdomo, who has invited me to VONA to speak on manuscript process. Roger Bonair-Agard and Ruth Forman will also be coming in to speak. I understand Willie’s manuscript workshop group will be joined by Suheir Hammad’s poetry group for this Friday morning talk. It’s great to be invited to be a part of this group of poets and authors of color, and I’m excited to finally meet Suheir, whose work I’ve admired in a big way. I am very flattered to hear she is also an admirer of my work.
I think about all the contemporary American poetry naysayers, frothy and hysterical about the decline and irrelevance of poetry, that American poetry is doomed, that print is dead. Funny, now that I come to think of it; it isn’t folks of color bullying us into believing that American poetry is drawing its last breath. On the contrary, think of all of our mentors, who’ve pushed and pulled us “emerging” poets of color to cross over into varying levels of critically acclaimed and academy approved authordom since the latter part of the last century, and think of how this trend is only growing into booming in this new century.
Perhaps this is what white American naysayers are lamenting (Collins, for example, and also I’ve noticed a trend over at Silliman’s blog of highlighting “poetry is doomed” articles); it’s not their poetry or their narrow band brand of poetry growing in popularity, but rather, assisted in part by more accessible technology and much more so by our mentors and the places they have secured in American poetry, these authors of color who write and publish with very pressing political concerns, these continuing waves of writers who are no longer looking to a white American mainstream for permission to speak or move, who are instead driving into the American poetry scene and continuing to change American poetry.
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Poetics, Supporting Other Writers, and the PAWA Arkipelago Author Workshop and Reading Series
[Edit: additions to our PAWA reading schedule!]
It seems my recent Billy Collins post has garnered much interest and discussion, so thank you all for your comments. I am always glad to have these conversations, though I am interested in folks’ responses to my Kay Ryan post. I am trying to stay in a positive space, and I think the poetic openness discussed in the Ryan article is a good impetus to reassess what I am doing. The Pinay Poetics panel at KAPWA, for example, reminded me that some of my most important work is to remain concrete in my support of my Pinay, API, and writers of color colleagues and emerging writers.
My concern is how we practice and maintain community in such an apparently competitive field, whose monetary rewards are non-existent, and whose resources are already apparently stretched thin.
In refreshing contrast to Billy Collins’s recent statements on poetry and transparency, I have excerpted from the Newsweek article, “The Reluctant Poet Laureate,” Kay Ryan’s thoughts on poems and poetry:
At one point Ryan described the words in a poem as a loose net around a swimming fish, invisible except in the flash of its turn. The fish—the secret life—is at once caught and free. “You have to feel that you haven’t solved” a poem, she explains. “It refreshes you to return to it. That’s a very strange thing about a poem.” It can be frustrating, of course, to finish reading and realize you’ve just begun. Poetry is resistant. In a culture in which the “take-away” is paramount, poetry gives nothing away. You have to look past whatever the poem seems “about” to see what it is. “It’s what we can’t/know that interests/us,” Ryan writes in “Absences and Breaks.”
[...]
The poem itself is an invitation into those high places, the low-oxygen atmosphere above our understanding. To accept the invitation and really enter the poem is to make a demanding ascent—but a thrilling one, too.
“To read a poem is to be, I don’t know, relieved of oneself to some degree,” Ryan says. “One of the main things that poetry does is make you feel looser and larger … It does offer us a kind of mental freedom.”
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[Please distribute widely via your social networking tool of choice!]
The Filipino American Center of the San Francisco Public Library in association with Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. presents:
Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. Literary Reading with
Randall Mann, Kristin Naca, and Debbie Yee
Saturday July 11, 2009
2:00 -4:30 pm
Latino Hispanic Community Meeting Room B
Randall Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, BREAKFAST WITH THOM GUNN (University of Chicago 2009) and COMPLAINT IN THE GARDEN (Zoo/Orchises 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize; and co-author of the textbook WRITING POEMS, Seventh Edition (Pearson Longman 2007). He works as an editor and lives in San Francisco.
Kristin Naca’s poems have been published in Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner and Octopus Magazine. She recently graduated with a PhD from University of Nebraska, and MFA from Pitt. Her book Bird Eating Bird was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, for the mtvU National Poetry Series Prize. It will appear with Harper Perennial in September.
Debbie Yee is a trusts and estates attorney and Kundiman fellow. Debbie’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, OCHO, Fence and The Best American Poetry 2009. Debbie blogs irregularly at www.debbieyee.com.
All programs at the library are free.
San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin Street (@ Grove)
sfpl.org
I’m getting ready for tomorrow’s KAPWA Conference, which takes place at San Francisco State University. I’ll be moderating the Pinay Poetics panel at 2:45 pm in Burk Hall Room #241. Speaking on poetic process will be Aimee Suzara, Elsa Valmidiano, Irene Faye Duller, Karen Llagas, Maiana Minahal, and Niki Escobar.
I am anticipating some sincere and detailed articulation of how each poet comes to her poem. I have been thinking about why this would be important information. On this here blog, I discuss my work all the time. It’s been helping me clarify for myself what I am doing with each poem, with each poetic project, and with manuscript. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to hear from other poets, emerging and otherwise, that my ruminations are helpful to them. I’m glad for this.
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor has a good post regarding the actual creative writing that occurs on the blog, as well as the substantive conversations that occur in blog and as a result of blog. I have only seen Bec in person once, when she flew into San Francisco to read for Achiote Press a couple of years back, for the chapbook issue featuring me, her, and Rich Villar. I do have to say that despite having only once spent face to face time, she and I have had some very good discussions about poetics, storytelling, and indigeneity. It was via her blog that I learned about her Tao Po! workshop, hence rounding out my Diwata manuscript’s final revisions.
Anyway, on to my point. I’m also glad to have been blogging my poem drafts here, gradually refining these, and talking out the different series I have been writing. It’s always comforting to know I am being productive. I hate the feeling of not being able to write a poem, and/or I hate suspecting that I am not writing enough poetry, even though, as Pat Rosal said in his recent Culturebot interview, “Poetry and all its affiliated efforts are my work.” This is reassuring, knowing that I do indeed engage in these “affiliated efforts” of reading, performing, hearing and seeing other authors read and perform. Still, I need to be writing poems.
(By the way, I ultimately take down many of these poems when I start submitting them to journals.)
