Sticky Words: Poetry Community

Certainly, “Poetry Community” is different from who I invite into my home, who I invite to sit at my table, and/or share a meal with; over lunch with Maria and another professor Michael (can’t remember his last name) after the Los Medanos reading/event, I mentioned how good it feels to actually sit and have a meal with folks that I encounter professionally. Sometimes there are intersections between “Poetry Community” and who I invite into my home/share a meal with, and then I am totally cool with when there aren’t intersections.

I refer back to my previous blog post in which I reference Luis Francia’s July 2004 Philippine Inquirer article, in which he brings up my generation of Filipino American poets, and the apparent absence of “intramural sniping and oneupmanship” which he depicts as more prevalent among his and previous generations.

In a series of private emails, a fellow Filipino American poet of my generation brings up a very good point about misdirection. In this industry of limited resources and unlimited ego, how well or how badly do we act when we believe we are being overlooked or erased, whether or not the party doing the overlooking or erasing is doing so intentionally. I am becoming more interested in what we do about these erasures, where we direct or misdirect our anger. Let me be very clear on this point: I believe our anger about erasure is justifiable.

I am coming to believe more and more that if we are misdirecting our anger at one another, then we are simply contributing to more erasure. Again, here is all this energy wasted, and which we could otherwise be proactively expending on the work of writing more poems, more books, seeking publication, being our own publicity machines, establishing and extending our readerships, and connecting our work with these readerships.

This misdirection then, makes me think of the term, “horizontal violence,” in which a member of a disenfranchised community engages in acts of violence against members of his/her own disenfranchised community, simply because in his/her disenfranchisement, s/he is unable (even unwilling) to see that disenfranchisement is systematic, or because s/he doesn’t believe mobilizing against the institution or agents of the disenfranchisement will alleviate his/her situation. Oftentimes, acts of horizontal violence arise over what realistically amounts to minutiae.

I thought about all this again while speaking at Los Medanos College; I thought about the networks and the communities we actively create through bolstering our own and one another’s careers. I thought about being given these opportunities to engage with students, and once in the space, working very hard not to squander the opportunity to represent my work well. In turn, I think of what opportunities I am able to give other poets via editorial and curatorial projects, via critical reviews, and if I happen to bag a teaching gig, then also via assigned reading to my students, i.e. the aspects of the poetry industry to which I have access.

It’s these people with whom I actively exchange opportunities who are my community, people who may or may not ever sit at my dinner table in my home. We find one another somehow, at poetry readings and arts events, and in e-world. We exchange emails, read one another’s blogs, keep one another updated on our events and gigs. We get to know one another’s work this way, actually attending one another’s events and reading one another’s work, and what we end up having among/between us is a growing or substantial knowledge of or interest in one another’s work, politics, poetics, and an understanding or belief about its value.