Portrait #2: Luis J. Rodriguez, Poet Activist Role Model

Blog post is forthcoming, but here is a picture for now, and a quick few words: it’s rare that I come out of a literary reading feeling enriched, but this is what went down yesterday evening at Luis J. Rodriguez’s reading and talk at the SF Mission Branch Public Library, in a room full of young folk, teachers, parents and children, community activists, and presumably other writers as well. We were enriched. We came out of there, better people for it. And this is the power of Word in the hands of one who believes it matters.

Belated reading post: On Javier O. Huerta, on translation, on the task of the translator

Oscar has said much good stuff about Javier O. Huerta’s recent reading at UC Berkeley. What I am thinking about is bilingual poetry, and that bilingualism does not come with an on-off switch, nor is translation a neat 1:1.

Some back story first: I find I am generally surrounded by so many “translators” of poetry into English from languages that the translators themselves don’t speak. I have always been perplexed about this; simply put, I wonder how it is done, translating when you don’t even know, live, function within the language you are translating. Even after I have studied translation of poetry as rigorous craft, that “translation” can be defined and interpreted in ways that do not entail any kind of faithfulness to the original text, I still wonder how it’s done. And why it’s done. And isn’t there someone more well-equipped to do so. It seems that what seems to take precedence is the translator himself, the filter function he takes upon himself, the bringer of the Word to his constituents.

Ack! Gig.

Ack! In honor of my “Gigs and Invitations: How to get me to say yes,” post, I’ve just been invited to give the commencement address at UC Berkeley’s Southeast Asian Studies Department Commencement Ceremonies.

In a moment of panic, I thought, “I couldn’t possibly pull this one off,” but after a real grounding conversation with one of the department’s professors (who reads my blog), I’ve accepted the invitation. Thankfully, the moment of panic has passed.

Some Ongoing Thoughts on Poetry and Literary Community

Zero Hate. A colleague of mine from one of my earliest poetry grad seminars had written a ditty of a poem entitled, “Zero Hate Poem,” which basically listed all these things the author liked. He told us that he titled the poem, “Zero Hate Poem,” simply because there was no hatred or hate present in it.

* * *

I wanted to refer back to Luis Francia’s article, “Different Rhymes, Different Times,” which was originally published in the Philippine Inquirer in July 2004, though the original link has since been unlinked. I’d reprinted it in its entirety on my former blog, and I am glad I did. Link here. What struck me in 2004 about his write-up on my generation of Filipino American poets still strikes me today:

Reflecting on [José Garcia] Villa made me think of the younger Filipino-American poets, who are a very different breed, less into intramural sniping and one-upmanship than into what appears to be a genuine spirit of encouragement and mutual respect.

More quick thoughts on work and visibility: Rigoberto González on Achiote Press and Palabra

[Some additions and revisions made below.]

This morning on the Poetry Foundation blog, Rigoberto González shouts out two literary journals/publishing projects, Achiote Press and Palabra, both of which I’d like to call grassroots, or from the ground up, and both of which feature the works of writers of color, not as in “when liberal-minded literary journals try to be down with the brown and put out ‘all-Latino issues,’ an effort akin to a migra raid, if I’ve ever seen one. The well-meaning editors round up la raza for one-time only party.”

“One-time only party,” in which, I’d add, only the work of the most mainstream writers of color in American letters and their sanctioned mainstream protégés make it past the mean lookin doorman, down the red carpet, and into the VIP room. Which is not to say that the work is not technically adept or lovely; it’s just that the work is not so varied or presents variations within a strict set of parameters, imposed from the outside. And then when the special ethnic issue of said journal is said and done, no one has learned anything new about the literary, linguistic, and even political concerns of the majority of writers of color in American letters, and in so many alternative spaces, in community arts centers, urban parks, indie bookstores, political rallies.

The special ethnic issue model is therefore a mere reinforcement of the establishment, a non-examination of the existing monolingual standard American English white middle America erroneously assumed to be universal parameters by which literary work must be read, a circumscribing of marginal space charitably given to us writers of color, ultimately conveying the message that writers of color cannot withstand editorial rigor, and that our work is not worthy of publication without this half-assed charitable gesture. This, I consider the opposite of grassroots. And let me be clear that grassroots also entails editorial rigor. That said, I appreciate Rigoberto calling the editorial work of Achiote and Palabra “activism.”

Just figuring out stuff as I work on hammering out the organizational and administrative details for a forthcoming editorial and publication project we’re going to get going on from our Oakland homebase.

As well, on a total “me” tip, Rigoberto has made my morning:

Past [Achiote Press] projects include works by three of my favorite writers: Javier Huerta, Barbara Jane Reyes and Francisco X. Alarcón.

Check out Achiote Press here: most recent issues include Javier O. Huerta’s “American Copia,” and Across and Between the Void, with writings by Padcha Tuntha-Obas and Alysha Wood.

Quick thoughts on Work and Visibility : This Past Weekend’s raúlrsalinas Memorial Poetry Event

So many wonderful stories shared yesterday evening about raúlrsalinas at Galería de la Raza. I could say much about the memorial event, but for now, let me just say how not only was I struck by how much of a life and artistic influence he was to so many Chicano poets and artists, but I got to thinking again about the concrete work of asserting and maintaining community visibility.

I am thinking of the artist/muralist who spoke and whose name I don’t remember; she wanted to make sure folks all remembered that the work of ensuring visibility which raúlrsalinas did included his indie bookstore Resistencia, and his indie publisher/small press Red Salmon Arts. As well, in the 70’s-80’s, he was a part of the Editorial Pocho Ché Collective; a group of Chicano poets who published their constituents’ books. I believe he has provided a clear blueprint for his “poet children” of how to continue working.

In terms of the work of being an elder, what values and corresponding practices an elder imparts upon his “poet children,” and “poet family,” I am thinking of Nina Serrano, who read raúlrsalinas‘ poem, “El Tecato Side 2,” and shared with us that she learned compassion from Salinas’ non-judgment of folk whom we’ve learned to look down upon, as in this poem, which she told us she used to dislike for that openness, the drug addict who understands his addiction, his need for a fix, as the same as his children’s need for food and nourishment. That others didn’t understand was something of a mystery to him.

This is just a smidgen of what went down yesterday evening, which also included Ms. Lorna Dee Cervantes performing the hell out of raúlrsalinas’ seminal “Un Trip through the Mind Jail,” included in the book of the same name, which Alejandro Murguía likened to Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I imagine that performing this poem must be a great honor.

Week of Literary Events : Playing Catch Up : Dagoberto Gilb and “Young Adult Literature”

Whew! We really did spend this past week at a whole slew of literary events. Sure is a lot of stuff to process here, so I will do this slowly.

We saw Dagoberto Gilb at Modern Times Bookstore, and as he read from his most recent novel, The Flowers, he also had a good talk about “young adult literature,” and as a Latino, being treated as an adolescent by agents and editors in the American literary industry. This was definitely an apt talk, given that the majority of the audience appeared to be Chicano/Latino students from SFSU, students of Alejandro Murguía, perhaps writers themselves. While the narrator of The Flowers is a fifteen year old boy, Gilb asserts that he does not think of this novel as part of the niche market called “Young Adult Fiction”; it is as much “Young Adult Fiction” as Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer.

More Poetry Thoughts for the Day

Patrick Rosal has a wonderful post on joy and poetry, specifically the joy which poets bring to audiences at readings and/or performances, and the joy which poets feel to connect with audiences, that this connection is most apparent in an audience’s visceral responses to a poet’s words or combination of words, to interesting, unexpected lines or images.

I tend to think it’s a very fortunate thing I did not come up in the poetry world in an institution whose constituents are bled of their joy as they are trained to exhibit a “cool” pretentious intellectual distance as a poet from an audience, or as an audience member from the poet sharing her words with a room full of interested or even just curious audience members.

Bits of Poetry News

(1) OCHO #16: MiPOesias Magazine Print Companion is now available at Amazon. Have a look see here.

(2) Many thanks to Brenda Iijima of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs who will be publishing my chapbook, Cherry. More info forthcoming.

(3) Many interesting folk have been visiting this here blog; this weekend has seen both Bill Knott and Juan Felipe Herrera commenting on recent posts. So interesting.

(4) Tomorrow evening is Literary Death Match! Will be sure to get all diva’ed fantastic for the affair.

(5) We saw Dagoberto Gilb this evening at Modern Times Books in the Mission. Alejandro Murguía was there with Raza Studies and/or Creative Writing classes from SFSU. More on all this later. Now, sleep.

Gigs and Invitations: How to get me to say yes.

Here’s the thing. I’ve recently been invited to speak at a couple of different places; I’ve accepted one invitation and I’ve turned down the other. On the positive tip, the invitation I’ve accepted is to speak at UCSB in an Asian American Studies class, in which 200+ students are anticipated to enroll for Spring Quarter. They will be required to read my book. 200+ guaranteed booksales in one pop is always a strong determining factor for my accepting an invitation.

The professor has invited me to either guest lecture or participate in an interview or dialogue with her during lecture. She has also invited me to participate in more informal discussions with professors and students in smaller settings. She’s also made sure to tell me they would be covering my travel and accommodations, as well as offering me an honorarium. These are also strong determining factors. Time off work and travel are expensive. And all this guest lecturing in academic institutions is Work.

Portrait #1: Local Flip Indie Scene.

Manong Al Robles rappin with folk at Arkipelago Books. Bayanihan Center. SoMa. San Francisco. 02/16/2008.

Independent. Indie. Small Press.

In related news, Poeta en San Francisco is back on SPDBooks’ Bestseller List for January 2008.

And in related news, here’s an announcement from Susan Schultz:

ANOTHER new Tinfish title!!!

A Communion of Saints, by Meg Withers.

R. Zamora Linmark, author of Rolling the R’s and other books, writes of Withers’s new volume of prose poems:

Welcome to Meg Withers’ Hawai’i: the eighties’ Eden for exiles, outcasts, and the “eternally tormented,” where Rose is sometimes Bob, Arlene used to be Allen, George is Georgia, and “hard sex (is) by Pfizer.” These saints, living on the margins of Honolulu, get dolled up, get high on coke and cocktails, whore day and night, bar fly from Hotel Street to Kuhio Avenue, find home in each other, and, when tragedy strikes, seek healing and wisdom from na po mokole. Divided into three books and interspersed with Biblical passages that offer an alternative, if not more happening, way of interpreting Luke et al, A Communion of Saints reverberates with the street beat of the eighties and captures the glam and heart of that era. Unapologetic, vibrant, and at times, elegiac; in short, a fine work from a promising poet.

Speaking of Indie Publishing, and Speaking of Local Poetry Scene

Founder of Poor Magazine and author Ms. Tiny Gray-Garcia, and Tony Robles are in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, for tonight at The Beat Museum in North Beach is the Poetry Battle of the Sexes, which Tiny and Tony have organized. I love the way those two work together. And. Oughtta be fun, watching poets beat each other up on Valentine’s Day.

In the meantime, thank you for all the comments coming in on yesterday’s blog post. A couple of excerpts:

From Francisco Aragón:

One of my favorite “historical” models in this “debate” is Charles Reznikoff and the Objectivist Press. They (he and Zufofsky and Oppen) published each other in hard bound editions of 300 or so.

Indie Publishing: Some Thoughts

There’s a pretty interesting discussion going on in list serve world regarding small presses, independent presses, and self publishing. This last item really is the sorest point of contention, given the apparent stigma of “vanity publishing.” I don’t know so much what the difference is between “vanity publishing” and doing DIY. IS there a difference? How is each term defined?

One point being discussed is publishing houses and prestige, and under what circumstances is it important to be published by a prestigious publisher. I wonder how prestige is defined or determined, first of all. Still, the part of this discussion that’s most interesting to me is this: if your intent as a poet is to get your work out into the world, to reach your perceived readership, audience, and/or communities, then whether or not your publisher is prestigious should not be so important (in grad school, one of my professors said to me that whether a publisher had an effective distribution system in place was more important). If a major part of your publishing career revolves around university tenure, then landing book contracts with a prestigious publisher is more of a concern. But not all poets operate within that system.

Akira Kurosawa: Drunken Angel

Thank heaven for the much awaited Criterion DVD of Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948). “Much awaited” for this being the first of the Kurosawa films to feature Toshirô Mifune, and the first to feature Mifune acting the young hothead to Takashi Shimura’s sensei figure.

I swear, I totally was rooting for Mifune’s tubercular character Matsunaga, to really make a break from the yakuza scene, culture, way of life, and in doing so, heal himself. I don’t know that he was made to be a morally conflicted thus sympathetic character, so I am thinking it was in his apparent self-destruction, anxiety (as evidenced by that dream sequence of his dead self chasing his beautiful self through ocean waves, and which actually reminded us of the video for The Cure’s “Close to Me”), and his being rather pathetic, flailing around drunk and flying off the handle in violent fits, becoming increasingly sallow and coughing up blood when he should be winning a knife fight.

Adding to the February Poetry Schedule, and additional thoughts on Nathaniel Mackey

Wow. Here’s a couple of intense events I will be participating in this month:

• February 20: Literary Death Match! Thanks to Parthenon West Review editor Chad Sweeney, who’s somehow convinced me to represent them there. Details here. Please come out for this, to offer lots and lots of encouragement and moral support (and/or to buy me whiskey).
• February 23: Zapatismo! Thanks to Rupert Estanislao, who I believe will also be participating in this series of events, which are in celebration of the release of The Fire and the Word, A History of the Zapatista Movement, by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, to be published by City Lights Books. We’ll be reading in Oakland, somewhere on International Blvd. Details are forthcoming. But for now, I’ll say that I’m so interested in this organization’s inclusion of Filipino poets.

Quick thoughts: Sesshu Foster, City Terrace Field Manual

Good Lord this book is dense, spiky, and ferocious. I am actually taking a break from it as we speak, after relishing in and wincing at the details of these broken human bodies; one split open at the ribcage, each half clamped down like butterfly wings “pinned to a sheet,” then stapled and sewed back up. This image actually reminds me of a whole raw roasting chicken before and after you cleave it. Another human body has his hand split in two by a stray chain from a chainsaw, his skin flapping aside and revealing yellow fat underneath.

Quick Thoughts: Nathaniel Mackey at UC Berkeley 02/07/08

This would be the second time I’ve seen Nate Mackey read; the first was at was at the de Young Museum in SF (re-cap here), in which he performed with Hafez Modirzadeh, and in which the collaboration not only made a little more apparent or accessible the music of Mackey’s speech, and then I think also added another layer of narrative to the listening experience.

To hear him read solo this time was different, and in some ways, a more intense listening experience. I understand more now what he meant when he spoke of speech aspiring to be music, which obviously (or not) can be detected in his repetitions and refrains, or what I am thinking of as reverse litanies, and then on top of these repetitions, an elaboration, as in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 58″: “… Nub’s raw republic / absconded with we thought, Nub short / for Nubia we thought, though we / thought…”

OCHO 16 is now available!

OCHO 16: MiPOesias Magazine Print Companion

Guest Edited by Barbara Jane Reyes

Featuring: Tara Betts, Brian Dean Bollman, Ching-In Chen, Sasha Pimentel Chacón, Linh Dinh, Sarah Gambito, Jessica Hagedorn, Jaime Jacinto, Nathaniel Mackey, Craig Santos Perez, Matthew Shenoda, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Truong Tran, Dillon Westbrook, Debbie Yee

Cover Art: “Imperialism, 24″ by Juan Carlos Quintana.

Buy your copy here.

on “success” and “successful” in poetry

This picture of Maxine Hong Kingston was taken last month at City Lights Books by Oscar. We were there for the NBCC Awards Finalists Announcements at City Lights Books on January 12th. Actually, I think we were really there to say hi to Rigoberto Gonzalez, who’d blasted in and out of town so fast, that we’d have otherwise missed him.

Anyway, I bring this all up now because I realize that I had no connection otherwise to what was going on in the place, no connection to the NBCC, and few if any connections to any of the finalists or presenters. Seeing Kingston speak, however, reminded me of being a teenager and undergrad at Berkeley, routinely seeing her on campus while I was on my way to class, and getting giddy every time this would happen.

When I was 18, I wanted to be like Kingston, as much as I wanted to be like Amy Tan. Certainly, this has changed since then. But at the time, how big a deal was it for me to actually have these women’s books on my formative bookshelves, and reading them for English literature classes in 1989. It was a really big deal.