Sprawling thoughts on literary community while reading Juan Felipe Herrera
I am currently reading Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007, and it’s making the little hamster wheel in my head turn. As I blogged yesterday, I am thinking/revisiting this local scene, this grassroots, DIY Filipino American scene, and I am thinking on what can be said about our literary traditions as San Francisco Bay Area Filipino American writers/artists.
Herrera discusses the Floricanto tradition, and its influence on his generation of Xicano/Chicano writers/artists. Without getting too deep into what Floricanto is, I can say I had previously encountered the term at SFSU’s Poetry Center where Alejandro Murguía was hosting a Floricanto Festival which sprawled SF’s Mission District, and which featured so many younger poets. That’s where I first heard Tomás Riley read/perform from his book, Mahcic.
My point here is the active work of ensuring continuity of literary tradition.
It can be said of Filipino American literary traditions, that we (my generation) write after Jessica Hagedorn who writes after (among others) Al Robles who perhaps writes after Carlos Bulosan who wrote after Walt Whitman, or that we might even write after Jose Garcia Villa, who wrote in the world of Modernism. Hagedorn, of course, wrote after Kenneth Rexroth, and again, ka-ching! Back to an American/Western literary movement/tradition.
I am not trying to say this is a bad thing.
Rather, I am just concerned with lineage. I am concerned with literature, and how to continue to build upon existing traditions, especially when I see the local scene more concerned with live performance than with the printed word. I am not trying to say this is a bad thing either. I think, as the Xicano/Chicano literary movement I discuss above tells me, that we can span written word and spoken word, or printed poetry and performance poetry, as with Herrera’s work in 187 Reasons, where the litany is strongly represented on the page. Tomás’ work also works well, both in performance and on the page; his work does different things in these two different media, rather than the page being a score for the performance.
I am interested in poetry that does this, poets who do this spanning, and thriving in its spanning.
Ultimately, I am concerned with visualizing a critical mass of Filipino American printed word, and I am thinking one good way to be able to do this is through centralizing or consolidating the sprawl that is Filipino American poetry/literature. I am perched and ready to do something. I’m a Pinay poet with an action plan. I am kind of jumping out of my skin.
